Foam Finger

Darin Barney

An artefact submitted by Darin Barney to Carbon Ruins: An Exhibition of the Fossil Era https://www.climaginaries.org/carbon-ruins 

Foam hands are a petrocultural artefact, an item that has not been produced since 2025. This one celebrated the Montreal Canadiens – known colloquially as “the Habs” – Canada’s most decorated professional ice hockey franchise. They were made of polyurethane foam, a major class of polymers conventionally derived from petroleum products. 

That is not why they are relics of a bygone age. As with many petroleum-based items, it was discovered that they could easily be made of other, less noxious materials. For example, a 2015 study in the journal Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering tested the Hansen solubility parameters of soy-castor oil-based polyols to evaluate their miscibility for polyurethane blends.¹ The study found that with increasing levels of bio-based polyol content, the density of open cell foams could be increased, and their stability and thermal conductivity improved. This discovery raised the possibility of a higher quality, stiffer and warmer, finger and confirmed that bio-based polymeric materials could balance economic and environmental considerations.

That was not the problem.

The reason foam hands are in the Museum of Carbon Ruins is that, culturally, they became unintelligible outside the context of professional sports fandom, which died with the carbon era.  Professional sports were among the most carbon-intensive and emissions heavy activities on the planet. Travel for teams and fans was a major source of the problem.² For example, in 2018, air travel for the four major North American leagues alone generated nearly 122 000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.2 Added to this was travel for major leagues in other countries and other sports (including, unbelievably, gasoline-powered automobile racing!) as well as emissions generated by accommodations, associated food and beverage systems, and the materials used to build infrastructures for recurrent, major international events. Combined annual emissions could fill many thousands of Olympic swimming pools (ironically, then still a common standard of measure used to represent large volumes of unwanted materials).  Meaningful emissions reductions were impossible to achieve, as franchise owners – many of whom made their fortunes in fossil fuels – refused to agree to shorter seasons and the reduced ticket, advertising and TV revenues these would bring. Players similarly refused to agree to corresponding salary decreases.

There were counter-possibilities. In 2021, the French Federation of Table Tennis pledged that a minimum of eighty percent of travel by the national team would use public transportation or car sharing. The experiment was short-lived. Few leagues followed the example of ping-pong, and the material basis of professional sport effectively collapsed by 2027, as fossil-fuel consumption became prohibitively expensive (even most Norwegians could not afford a tank of gas) and its production was largely phased out. With this, the foam finger became a mere historical curiosity.

1 Chaoqun Zhang and Michael R. Kessler, ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering 2015 3 (4), 743-749

2 Seth Wynes, Environmental Science & Technology 2021 55 (23), 15609-15615