Instagram has proven to be one of the most amazing tools for me over the past couple of years. I use it in my downtime to learn about my city, my province, and ultimately the world around me by following a great many British Columbians and Canadians. One of those is a company out of Victoria called , whom I mostly likely happened upon while going through the #britishcolumbia or #explorebc hashtags.
Woodcoast does something that I've long though would be incredible: they take old skateboards that are no longer rideable and they turn them into things of beauty for your home. The early part of my own career (before I started V.I.A.) was in the skateboard industry, and to see how many hundreds of thousands of boards we released through the companies I worked for every year always killed me. Especially knowing that they came from Canada (all good skateboards are made out of hard rock maple from Ontario), and knowing that once treated with glue in the manufacturing process, there's not much that could be done with them in terms of recycling. Woodcoast has managed to take the laminates from old skateboards and repurpose them into a number of products, my favourite being the bottle opener pictured below.
Of course Woodcoast does more than the housewares type of stuff; they make furniture and all sorts of other things of beauty, all out of wood. Follow them at and Like them on Facebook . Also, they've got an online store at if you want to get your hands on their stuff.
http://vimeo.com/69598317
