In Conversation With Chris Hines On Why The Wetsuit Industry's Switch From Neoprene To Natural Rubber Is The Moment That Matters
There are few people better placed to talk about sustainability in surfing than Chris Hines, MBE. Sitting down with him on the sand at Porthtowan, the Cornish beach where his campaigning life began, Chris carries the easy authority of someone who has spent four decades turning frustration into results, and making a difference.
In 1990 he co-founded Surfers Against Sewage, the campaign group that dragged Britain's pollution problem into the newspapers and into Parliament, and which has grown into one of the country’s leading marine environment charities. This cause is still close to Chris’ heart, and his portrayal in the 2026 Channel 4 docu-drama Dirty Business about his leadership of SAS at the time of the death of eight-year-old Heather Preen (who contracted E. coli from a beach in Devon in 1999) and his ongoing campaign for justice with Heather’s mother Julie, has introduced Chris to a wider audience of water-quality campaigners beyond the boundaries of the surf world.
After his time leading Surfers Against Sewage, Chris went on to become Sustainability Director at the Eden Project, where he conceived and delivered its pioneering "Waste Neutral" programme, an early case study for the circular economy. He served as a special advisor to the Secretary of State for the Environment under the Blair government at the turn of the millenium, and in 2008 he was awarded an MBE for services to the environment - an honour that he says stands for “Moaning Bloody Environmentalist”. To a generation of British surfers who first encountered his name in the pages of the 1980s surf magazine SurfScene, long before the campaigns and the honours, he is simply one of the most respected voices the UK surf community has.
Today, through regular keynote speaking gigs and his consultancy company A Grain of Sand, Hines advises businesses of all shapes, sizes and sectors on how they can do better by our planet. He’s been vocal in supporting and calling for surfing to lead the shift away from neoprene (the commercial name for chloroprene, the synthetic rubber foam that wetsuits have traditionally been made from since the 1950s) towards natural rubber wetsuits, made predominantly from rubber tapped from the Hevea tree. Hines believes a wholesale shift is not just possible but inevitable, and he is impatient with anyone still pretending otherwise.
"Approaching End Game"
Ask Chris Hines where the transition stands in 2026 and he doesn't hedge his bets:
"I think we're kind of approaching end game. It's gone from a slow resistance from the industry to now most of the industry embracing it."
The groundwork for the surf industry shifting to natural rubber was laid over a decade ago, with the development of the first viable natural rubber alternative. Since then more natural rubber foams have been developed and an increasing number of companies have bought in, ordered the natural rubber option, and pulled them through into finished products either adding a natural rubber wetsuit to their range or making the switch completely. That last step matters. Developing a material is one thing; committing to it at scale, across a full range, and putting it in customers' hands is another.
The old objections — that natural rubber wouldn't perform, wouldn't stretch, wouldn't keep you warm — have quietly evaporated. Chris points to free-surfers such as C-Skins’ Jayce Robinson and Australian transplant Noah Lane riding heavy, cold conditions in natural rubber suits, as living proof.
"I challenge pretty much 99% of surfers to say that they don't work."
He has the perspective to make the comparison. The wetsuits of Chris’ teens, fifty years ago, were "appalling" - stiff, inflexible, and leaving wetsuit rash on surfers’ necks and underarms. He points out that the leap in comfort and performance since then dwarfs the current switch. "The challenges are nothing like as big as going from where wetsuits were back in the 80s and 90s to this little transition. It's not a big deal."
Then he offers an analogy that, in signature Chris Hines style, is so simple that it’s almost impossible to argue with. The evening before our interview, curious, Chris had looked up what condoms are made of: the vast majority of them are made from natural rubber latex. His logic is disarmingly simple. If this natural material is trusted for the most sensitive and intimate contact imaginable, then the case against wrapping it around the rest of the body when we’re immersing ourselves in a sensitive marine environment, collapses. It is a joke that lands as an argument.
"If it’s good enough for that, then, of course, we want that kind of natural material around our bodies and in the sensitive oceans"
The Silent Majority
If the product is ready and the case is made, what's holding anyone back? According to Chris, the answer is a familiar human pattern: a small but vocal minority of doubters drowning out a large, silent majority who already agree.
He reaches for a striking piece of evidence. A major global study published in Nature Climate Change surveyed roughly 130,000 people across 125 countries and found that 89% of individuals demand stronger political action on climate change, yet almost all of them believed they were in the minority - what has since been termed the “Spiral of Silence”. A tiny fraction of committed sceptics, he argues, sways a slightly larger group of the uncertain, while the real majority stays silent, assuming that they stand alone.
"I think it's the same with the surfers. 89% of us will go, 'Yeah, of course we want a natural rubber wetsuit,' and of course we want our industry and the products we buy to be made in the most sustainable way - environmentally, but also socially as well."
That last clause - the social dimension alongside the environmental - is not throwaway. It leads directly to the intellectual framework Hines has carried through his career.
The Triple Bottom Line
"A great friend of mine, John Elkington," Chris begins, but that name is worth dwelling on… Now in his mid-70s, John Elkington is one of the founding figures and a world authority on corporate responsibility and sustainable capitalism. In 1987 he co-authored The Green Consumer Guide, a book that became a number-one bestseller and, for the first time, handed ordinary shoppers a practical way to vote with their wallets. He has since founded a string of pioneering environmental consultancies, and in one 2009 industry survey was ranked fourth in the world among sustainability thinkers, behind only Al Gore, Barack Obama and The Body Shop's Anita Roddick.
Chris met Elkington through another of his books, Holidays That Don't Cost the Earth. But John Elkington's most enduring contribution is a phrase that reframed how business measures success: the "triple bottom line."
"We've lived in a world where profit is the only driver, the only thing people need to care about. We're now shifting ever increasingly towards a world where yes, you've got to make profit, but you've also got to have an environmental and a social bottom line as well."
The idea is that a company should be judged on three accounts, not one: profit, people and planet. For decades it read as idealism. What has changed, and what makes Chris confident and optimistic, is that the triple bottom line is hardening from an ethical aspiration into a commercial and in some cases even a legal requirement. That is where the wetsuit debate connects to something much larger than surfing.
The Doors Closing Across Industries
Chris Hines's most compelling argument isn't really about surfing at all. It's about the way whole sectors are quietly rewiring the rules so that sustainability is no longer optional, but has become the price of entry.
What Chris is describing has a name. Since September 2021, the UK government's procurement rules (known as PPN 06/21) have required any supplier bidding for major central government contracts worth more than £5 million a year to publish a credible Carbon Reduction Plan committing to Net Zero by 2050. No plan, no bid. For businesses who rely on public-sector contracts, like one large construction company Chris knows and works with, this is not a marketing preference; it is a hard commercial gate, and it has slammed shut faster than the doubters expected.
The same shift is visible in an industry closer to home for anyone who watches to the end of the credits on their favourite TV show. In the UK film and television industry, BAFTA's Albert certification has become the recognised standard for sustainable production and every production commissioned by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky and Netflix in the UK is now required to measure its carbon footprint through the Albert calculator, with certified shows earning an on-screen mark in their end credits. Chris was sitting on a Sustainability Advisory Panel for the BBC when Albert was first developed and began to be adopted. What began as a voluntary calculator has since become an expectation woven into how that industry commissions work.
These are the "gateways" Hines keeps returning to: moments when an entire sector agrees on a sustainability standard, and standing still becomes an instant guarantee of falling behind. Surfing, he warns, cannot assume that it is exempt.
"There's this danger that surfing tries to exist in its own bubble, and meanwhile all the other industries are all moving past it. We don't want to be the last dirty little people using nasty old neoprene."
Horses, Then Cars
For Chris, the direction of travel is not in doubt, only the speed, and to convey how quickly a comfortable world can change, he reaches for a photograph.
"There's a classic picture from something like 1900 of a street in New York, and it's all horses - everything is horse-drawn, there's one or two cars. Something like ten years later, there's two horses - everything is cars. That's the moment we're going through."
Fifth Avenue in New York City on Easter Sunday morning in 1900. View showing horse drawn traffic of that period. Note only one auto in the comparison with a large amount of traffic. Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration
The famous image of Fifth Avenue does a lot of work. It reframes the switch to natural rubber not as a niche ethical choice but as a technological turnover already underway. It’s the kind that, in hindsight, looks obvious and total. Alongside the early movers in the surf world, the vast French sporting-goods retailer Decathlon has already moved its entire wetsuit range to natural rubber. "If a business can honestly say, 'We'll try and keep using petrochemicals,'" Hines says, "then I think they're not thinking properly about how to run their business." Investors, he adds, increasingly agree, treating strong environmental and social credentials as a marker of a safer, better long-term business bet.
The Rent We Pay
Some surfers, of course, would rather not think about any of this. We ALL surf to escape, and some surfers just want the best-performing wetsuit at the best price, and they don't really care what it's made of as long as it works. Chris understands their position, but he doesn't accept the philosophy behind it.
"There's a brilliant quote from Alice Walker: 'Activism is my rent for living on the planet.' And loads of our activism is in our pockets - it's in our money that we choose to spend."
Escape, he argues, is an illusion when the thing you're escaping to is itself under threat. In a rare moment where his optimism cannot overcome the reality, Chris cites a projection by the environmentalist Jonathon Porritt that, on current trajectories, between three and six billion people could be displaced by 2100. What’s that got to do with surfing? Well, that situation coming to pass would mean that many of the world's most coveted equatorial breaks would be in regions rendered uninhabitable by heat, hunger and conflict. The waves we travel for depend entirely on the stability we're gambling with.
He’s quick to point out that that doesn't mean grounding the surf trip, however, it just means rethinking it. When the climate question was put to the editors at Lonely Planet and Rough Guides, Chris recalls, the advice that came back was refreshingly liveable.
"Travel less, stay longer. What's not to love about that? That's a perfect thing."
Rather than a string of two or three-day strike missions to meet a swell, each with its own carbon-heavy flights, the answer is to go less often and go properly: sink into a place, surf a break for weeks, and get to know it. It is the rare piece of environmental advice that asks a surfer to have more of a good time, not less. The strike mission, in other words, is fine just so long as it stretches to a month and a half.
What Still Gives Him Hope
For all of the urgency, Chris Hines is no doom-monger. He’s a cheerful optimist, as any surfer who’s passed him on the beach in the depths of winter will attest. What sustains him, after 35 years of campaigning, is surfing itself, and the unique and powerful leverage that it carries.
Surfing, Chris points out, "punches way above its weight." It is "the ad man's dream," used to sell everything from washing powder to the internet, which makes it a disproportionately powerful cultural signal when it chooses to lead. He has seen that power up close. In the 1990s, SAS helped trigger billions of pounds of investment in cleaning up Britain's coastal waters, with world champion surfers like Tom Carroll and Tom Curren standing alongside campaigners to lobby MPs. The two crude sewage outfalls that once poured millions of gallons into the sea near his home are gone, and Chris is was so confident in the new waste water treatment technology that he built his home nextdoor to the local sewage treatment works.
His advice to the individual surfer is practical and unpreachy: understand what your gear is made from, ask whether you can buy better next time, love and repair what you own, and pass it on when you're done. And, above all, use the power in your pocket.
"Be a 'yay-sayer,' don't be a naysayer. The flip is really quite quick, and I think we will be the generation that will make that change happen."
We got over eating white bread when we found out that it isn’t good for us, he notes with a grin, and we can get over neoprene. Natural rubber is here to stay, the arguments are spent, and across the industry and in the minds of consumers the gateways are already closing. All that's left is for surfers to do what Chris Hines has always believed we do best: catch the wave before it breaks.
