Snow of Tomorrow | The Ski Industry Climate Summit 2026

There is a particular kind of tension you only notice when you step from a trade fair into a climate summit. On one side, the industry’s default rhythm: next season, next model, next launch window. On the other, a crisis that does not negotiate with marketing calendars, and a reality in which winters are increasingly defined by volatility, not reliability. That is why the third edition of the Ski Industry Climate Summit felt less like “another conference” and more like a deliberate attempt to slow down and talk honestly.

The summit took place in Bolzano alongside ProWinter Bozen, hosted by Atomic in collaboration with Protect Our Winters Europe. Christian Scheidermeier from the European Outdoor Group captured the summit’s core dilemma in one sentence that kept echoing across the two days: political turbulence is real, but pausing is not an option. “How we act now will determine what kind of future we create,” he said, emphasizing that progress is only possible “through joint collaboration.” That collaborative spirit is not just a nice idea; it is the summit’s practical reason for existing. As Jerome Pero of the Federation of the European Sporting Goods Industry put it, this is “where the ski industry defines its future,” precisely because no single actor can carry the sustainability challenge alone.

This year’s edition also made something else visible: the summit is evolving from a “brands talking to brands” format into a broader ecosystem conversation, bringing in resorts, federations, suppliers, NGOs and technical experts as essential parts of the same puzzle. The agenda reflects that shift very clearly, with Day One focusing on influence, advocacy and regulation, and Day Two going deep into circularity, standards and the engineering reality behind sustainable hardgoods.

Two days, two languages: politics and physics

Day One opened with a blunt headline: “The Winter Sports Industry Can Become More Influential,” followed by sessions on advocacy and compliance across Europe and North America. If you want a quick summary of the day’s underlying message, it is this: many companies are ready to build, but the playing field needs rules that are predictable enough to justify investment. That is not a complaint; it is a structural fact. A circular system cannot be willed into existence if the incentives reward the linear one.

Day Two, in contrast, spoke the language of implementation. Circular business models, product footprint standardization, data exchange formats, recycling systems, and then the technical heart of the summit: materials and manufacturing pathways that try to make “circular skis” something more than a slogan. This is also where an uncomfortable but hopeful pattern emerged. The ski industry is not short on ideas, and in several areas it is not even short on viable prototypes. What is fragile is scale, shared standards and political continuity. The solutions exist in pockets; the challenge is to connect those pockets into infrastructure.

The most radical lever is also the least glamorous: ski lifespan

If one presentation deserved a place at the top of a “Snow of Tomorrow” recap, it is the one that asked a question so basic that it exposes how much the industry still relies on assumptions: how long does a ski actually last?

Yessica Kurock, working on a PhD project at the University of Sherbrooke, presented results from a collaborative survey on durability, failure and end-of-life. The survey was built with the goal of generating actionable industry learning, not academic curiosity.

Her argument begins with a simple normalization problem. A ski that lasts two years and a ski that lasts four years can carry the same production footprint, yet the climate impact per year of use is very different once you divide by time on snow. If the industry wants to reduce emissions per skiing day, lifespan is not a side note; it is part of the equation. The survey itself is valuable because it replaces intuition with real patterns. Kurock described a dataset based on more than a thousand skiers and thousands of skis, capturing tens of thousands of ski days per season and supplementing the consumer perspective with rental shop inputs. That matters because the rental world is often where durability becomes brutally visible, and where “cosmetic decline” can be as decisive as structural failure.

The next question is the one brands quietly fear: why do people replace skis? Not the idealized story about “new tech,” but the real triggers. In multiple categories, Kurock showed that broken skis and failure were among the top replacement reasons, and she did not even require respondents to define failure as total functional collapse. This is crucial because it suggests that “durability” is not just a niche concern for the environmentally conscious; it is a mainstream driver of purchase cycles.

When respondents described failure modes, three issues dominated: edge damage or breaking, core shots or severe base impact damage, and topsheet delamination. Anyone who has ever watched a harmless-looking topsheet crack evolve into a creeping delam understands the significance. The important part is what Kurock did next: she framed these failure modes not as fate, but as a prompt for design-for-repair and targeted durability work, because at least some of them can be repaired, delayed, or made less likely through construction choices.

The rental picture shifts the emphasis. Here, the “winner” in terms of replacement reasons is often topsheet cosmetic decline, which consistently appears as a dominant driver. That single observation opens an entire sustainability corridor the industry rarely treats as such: if the aesthetic surface of a ski shortens its rental life, then surface design, replaceable layers, refurbishment and “looks new again” pathways are not just branding details; they are climate levers. Kurock’s final topic, end-of-life, might have been the most sobering because it is painfully familiar.

When asked what happens to skis at end-of-life, the most common answer from consumers was essentially: they go into storage. The second most common answer was more hopeful: skis get passed on or sold, which also means that calculating lifespan only from the first user understates real usage. What do people actually want? Structure. Consumers asked for recycling options; rental shops emphasized resale but also wanted better support, especially smaller operations without established channels.

From survey insight to engineering: measuring durability instead of guessing

Kurock’s talk became even more interesting because it did not end with “we should.” It handed off to Alexis Lussier Desbiens, who treated the survey as a starting gun for engineering work rather than an endpoint. His framing was simple: the industry has a “rate” of consumption, and increasing product life reduces that rate, which is exactly what climate action should aim to do. What he added, however, was a roadmap for how durability can be operationalized. One obstacle is that durability testing is slow and statistically demanding; you have to break products, and you have to do it enough times to say something meaningful.

The other obstacle is standardization, or rather the lack of it. Lussier Desbiens described how existing norms were defined decades ago and, in practice, asked for measurements at locations that no longer exist on modern skis, forcing his team to develop updated procedures. His early results illustrate why shared methods would matter. In tests on roughly 40 skis, results showed around a fourfold spread in breaking load at the tip and about a threefold spread in breaking load in front of the binding. That is not a small difference; it hints at a durability landscape with huge variance across products, construction concepts, and perhaps priorities.

They also explored delamination through a controlled “snapping” test designed to simulate stresses like jump landings or vibration, with skis sustaining anywhere from three to forty snaps before failure, again showing a wide range. Lussier Desbiens noted that edge design and how the edge transitions into the construction can play an important role in whether delamination initiates, suggesting that durability might be improved through very specific design choices rather than vague “make it stronger” approaches. The throughline here is more important than any single test number. If the industry wants consumers to keep skis longer, it needs a credible way to talk about durability that goes beyond anecdotes and beyond warranty fine print. Without shared metrics and open methods, durability remains a promise; with them, it becomes an attribute that can be engineered, compared and communicated.

Circularity in materials: recycled carbon that does not demand a new factory

While durability attacks the problem through time, circularity attacks it through materials and end-of-life loops. The summit featured several approaches that felt notably pragmatic, not because they are easy, but because they are designed to fit industrial constraints.

Hippolyte Houette from Fairmat made a point that should probably be at the top of any sustainability roadmap: if you ask large manufacturers to change their production processes, the adoption barrier becomes enormous, so the smarter strategy is often to deliver solutions that can drop into existing lines. He described product formats that can be integrated as layers, local reinforcements, and highlighted an interesting performance nuance: recycled carbon chip layers can provide damping characteristics that counter the “too stiff, too nervous” reputation recycled carbon carries in ski feel discussions. He also emphasized that the company’s ambition is to avoid a “sustainability premium,” because stable pricing is not a nice-to-have; it is the precondition for scale.

A different kind of circular ski: build it so it can be taken apart

One of the most conceptually disruptive sessions came with “reversible” manufacturing rather than “recyclable” marketing. In the SkiCycle+ presentation, Gian Reto Marugg and Simon Jacomet described replacing traditional epoxy bonding with thermoplastic adhesive films that can be de-bonded by heat, enabling disassembly of a ski into its components. This is not just a recycling trick; it changes the ontology of the ski. Marugg described how thermoplastic bonding can turn a ski from a compound into a modular system, making it possible to separate edges and bases without ripping them apart, and to think in terms of re-use, repair and reconfiguration rather than disposal.

Scaling circular solutions: the helmet case

The summit’s technical track also stepped beyond skis, which is where you often find useful cross-pollination. Martino Colonna from Re-Sport presented a chemical separation approach for helmets that aims to dissolve and recover polymers without degrading them. The emphasis was not “chemistry is cool,” but “chemistry can work if the infrastructure is designed and funded,” and he underlined that scaling from lab to plant is where projects either become reality or disappear, because industrialization produces new problems every day.

The point for winter sports hardgoods is not that helmet recycling is identical to ski recycling. It is that circularity rarely fails due to a lack of scientific concepts; it fails because systems for collection, sorting, tracking, and processing are underdeveloped. The summit, at its best, is a space where those system gaps are discussed openly, rather than hidden behind “innovative material” headlines.

If the technical answers exist, why is progress still fragile?

One sentence from the Amer Sports recap could be read as the summit’s internal memo: the challenges facing winter sports cannot be solved in silos. That is true, but it is also incomplete. The real question is what breaks silos in practice, and the 2026 summit gave an honest answer: standards, regulation, and shared infrastructure.

The summit program makes this visible through its emphasis on frameworks such as product footprint category rules and the Digital Product Passport, as well as on data exchange between brands and retailers. Those themes sound bureaucratic until you realize what they enable. Without shared footprint rules, “lower impact” becomes an advertising claim. Without traceability and consistent product data, repair, resale and recycling remain artisanal rather than systemic. Without harmonized regulation, companies that invest early risk being punished by price competition from those who wait.

That is why Ben Aiden’s quote hits harder than it first appears. Winter sports has always been a cooperative ecosystem, even when brands compete, because an inspiring winter experience is created by the combined work of resorts, retailers, federations, suppliers. If climate change threatens that ecosystem, the cooperative reflex needs to shift from event logistics to climate action.

James Fairbank from Atomic adds the missing tone for how to do this without falling into purity contests: it is not about perfection, but about being aware of impacts, being open about trade-offs, and working together to reduce them. In the context of hardgoods, that openness is not just moral; it is technical. Every solution has constraints: recycled materials need stable feedstock, disassembly needs infrastructure, durability needs standardized measurement, and none of it scales in a vacuum.

The most quietly powerful lever is also the least marketable: extending ski lifespan, not through vague claims, but through measurable durability and repairability, and through design choices that reduce the most common failure modes. A close second is infrastructure: the unglamorous network of take-back, resale support, and material processing that turns “recyclable” from a label into an outcome.

There is also a political dimension that cannot be dodged. Several technical solutions are ready enough to scale, yet they depend on stable regulatory signals and standardized rules to become default practice rather than premium niche. When Scheidermeier talked about political turbulence, he articulated what everyone in the room feels: the technology is moving, the will is growing, and the policy environment can still wobble.

If there is a closing thought that fits “Snow of Tomorrow,” it is not that the industry needs more ideas. It is that the industry needs to turn existing ideas into shared practice, and that requires pressure and trust from multiple directions. Consumers need to reward durability and repairability rather than novelty alone; brands need to commit beyond storytelling; and policymakers need to build frameworks that make circular solutions economically normal, not heroic exceptions.

The summit is not the finish line. It is, increasingly, where the ski industry rehearses what it would look like to actually change.