When people think about the environmental impact of skiing, they usually think about getting there — the flight, the drive, the fuel burned reaching the mountains. That part of the picture is real, and it matters. But it's easy to overlook the footprint that exists before you ever click into your bindings: the footprint of making the skis themselves.
What actually goes into a pair of skis
One of the only peer-reviewed life cycle assessments ever conducted on ski manufacturing was published by a team studying "Grown," a Norwegian brand experimenting with lower-impact materials. The study found that producing a single conventional freeride alpine ski released around 22.6 kg of CO2 — roughly a third of that from the raw materials themselves, and about 60% from the manufacturing process. For a pair, that's somewhere in the region of 45 kg of CO2 before the skis have even left the factory.
The same study found the more sustainably-built Grown ski, made with lower-impact materials and processes, cut that down to around 16.4 kg of CO2 per ski — a meaningful improvement, but still a real number.
Where a ski is manufactured matters too, sometimes enormously. Extrem Skis, a small Nordic manufacturer powered entirely by local hydro power, reports a footprint of just 28.8 kg of CO2 for an entire pair — but notes that building an identical pair in a country with a high-carbon electricity grid could push that figure up to 120 kg of CO2 per single ski, nearly four times higher, purely because of where the manufacturing energy comes from.
Buying second-hand skips this step entirely
Here's the part that's easy to miss: none of this footprint is a one-time cost you can offset by keeping your skis longer or skiing more days on them. It's baked in the moment the ski is manufactured, whether it gets skied for one season or ten.
When you buy a second-hand pair instead of a new one, you're not reducing that footprint — you're avoiding it completely. No new core is pressed, no new base is bonded, no new pair ships from a factory to a warehouse to a shop. The environmental cost was already paid, by whoever bought the skis originally, and buying them second-hand means that cost never has to be paid twice.
To be fair, the same research that measured ski manufacturing emissions also found something worth keeping in perspective: a single car journey to a ski resort can outstrip the entire carbon footprint of producing and distributing a pair of skis. Getting to the mountain is still the biggest single factor in most people's ski footprint, not the gear itself. But that doesn't make the manufacturing footprint irrelevant — it just means gear and travel are two separate levers, and gear is the one you have full control over every time you buy.
Why this matters for how you shop
Every pair of skis on MountainLoop already carries its manufacturing footprint — it was created once, by someone else, at some point in the past. Buying it doesn't add to that number. It just means one fewer new pair needs to be pressed, bonded, and shipped this season to meet demand that a perfectly good existing pair could already meet.
It's not a reason to never buy new gear — sometimes a specific ski, in a specific length, simply doesn't exist second-hand yet. But when it does, choosing it over new is one of the most direct, unambiguous environmental choices a skier can make with their gear.
Sources: Life cycle assessment study on Grown skis, as reported by FasterSkier; Extrem Skis sustainability disclosures (citing RISE and Electricity Maps data).