Here at the Astral Buoyancy Company one of our primary goals is to reduce our factory’s waste to nil.  We are proud to create handcrafted PFD’s from the most environmentally considerate closed cell buoyant foams available such as Gaia and PE foams, developed as an alternative to toxic PVC found in the lifejackets of yesteryear. The die cutting process, which stamps out the flotation panels from the sheets of these various foams, creates about 80% yield, leaving about 20% of the raw material as excess.   We have been saving this excess scrap material since we started about six years ago in hopes of one day creating byproducts as a usable alternative to the landfill. The first of these by-products is the AstroPad dog bed…

The Astro Pad, our first By-Product

With that said its time to meet Sampson, our shop dog and tester for the AstroPad prototypes.  Sampson has been in the whitewater scene for about six years now, sniffing around venues like Salida, Squamish, Fayetteville, and Banks… pretty much being a full time river dog along the way and now he’s a big time operator in the home office in Asheville, NC.  Ole boy even surfed Skookumchuck in a zodiac raft back in ‘06 so you know he’s legit, if you don’t believe me check out his Blog. Anyways, here’s a shot of Sampson at his first week on the job at Astral when he was using a scrap sheet of foam as his pad.

Sampson before the AstroPad (with toy squirrel in background…no, its not a brown)

As time passed and more scrap foam was accumulated it was time to bring the AstroPad concept to fruition.  We developed a process to essentially chip the leftover foam into small bits that when stuffed into the liner create a memory foam like feel.

Foam shavings used as fill for the AstroPad

For the outer shell we used our leftover fabric scraps (also saved since the company’s inception) to create a unique and stylish patchwork design.  We topped it off with adding a Velcro closure for easy washing of the outer shell and added some convenient carrying handles for transport.  The first batch of AstroPads left the warehouse a few weeks ago and since then we have made Sampson and his fellow river dogs quite happy after a long day on the water.  Here’s a few of these happy hounds:

Roscoe, photo courtesy of Chan Jones

Chomski, photo courtesy of Astral’s Tracey Haswell

Philip Curry and Sampson

For complete info on the AstroPad check out our Products Pages and email us at info@astralbuoyancy.com to place an order. Keep in mind that the colors are assorted as they are made from our leftover fabrics (but we try to make them all look sweet cause we know your dog wants to look good too!)

Stay tuned for more Astral By-Products…

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 1:07 am and is filed under Inside Astral. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.