Eco friendly servicing tips from Butta.co.uk
Butta; how did it all start?
Butta is a UK company taking the snowboard world by storm. Jim, Co-owner of Butta came up with Butta’s own, eco friendly recipe in a ‘laboratory’ in his Dad’s garage!  It doesn’t get much more home grown than that!
Jim had been a technician in servicing workshops for many years both in the UK and in France, waxing boards and skis all day every day, breathing in toxic fumes, never wearing a mask or having much ventilation. Jim says, ‘I would leave the workshop everyday feeling really bad, I had headaches, nausea, felt like I had been getting high all day and never wanted to go out. I was always tired, I didn’t want to go snowboarding, so I decided to look into the medical side effects of the products I was using and came across a study from California.
The study explained the dangers of fluorocarbons and the symptoms. They were the same symptoms that I had, nausea, vomiting, headaches, muscle fatigue, and even things like short-term memory loss and lowering your sperm count. I was about to turn the ripe old age of 30 and didn’t need any help with that! The study also advised a half hour exposure limit to fluorocarbons in any 8 hour shift which is enforced in the USA. So I had to question why I was exposing myself to this for 8 hours a day!
The study spurred me on and I set out on a little mission to find out about different eco waxes, I looked at what an eco wax was, what the difference was, how they rode on the snow and I never found one that I liked. This was when I decided to take over my Dads garage and turn it into a laboratory. This was the start of Butta. With my C in GCSE science it was not as easy as I thought it would be, however, 6 months later I came out with my first recipe, which is the Butta original.
Butta was never actually meant to go to market. It was really just for myself to use in my workshop but now, after 2 years we are stocked in over 80 shops in the UK, 3 of us still hand make every block (6,000 in the last 2 months).
My hope is that we are going to get rid of those fluorocarbon waxes, the ones that never bio degrade, the ones that people are leaving in the mountains every winter, very similar to throwing a cigarette but off the chair lift, it will stay there forever and add to that the damage to your body.’
If you are interested in joining Jim’s campaign to keep our mountains fluorocarbon free then check out www.butta.co.uk and take a look at their eco friendly products.
Butta essential tips
It’s super easy to wax you own board, read on for some tips to save you money and a step by step guide!
- You don’t need an expensive waxing iron. You can get a value iron for around £4 (in 2 years we are on our 3rd one and at times have waxed 1,500 boards in a week!)
- A keyboard stand from ebay will work well as a waxing stand. We pay around £15 instead of £120!
- Add some BMX handle grips to your keyboard stand for stability at about £5
- The Butta Service Kit gives you everything you need except the iron and stand
How to wax your board: Step by step
1 – Remove old wax from your board using the Green stuff cleaner. It’s totally eco friendly and easy to use. Never wax a board before cleaning it first
2 – Plug your iron in and have it on medium heat
3 – Holding your block of wax against your iron, drip the appropriate amount along your board evenly
4 – Evenly Iron the wax onto the base, making sure the iron is on a medium heat and never left in one place for too long
5 – One the wax has ‘set’, use your scraper to remove all excess wax. Always scrape from tip to tail.
6 – Using your brush, polish your board until the base is smooth and free of excess wax.
Keep an eye out for more tips from Jim at Butta on how to fix scrapes and dinks!