Stockholm Centre Offering Snowsports Year-Round
A popular urban ski hill in the Swedish capital Stockholm will offer skiing and snowboarding year round from now on, having unveiled a major new dry slope.
The Hammarbybacken hill has long been a popular wintersports destination and is run by Skistar., the same company that runs Scandinavia’s biggest resorts like Sweden’s Are and Salen as well as Hemsedal and Trysil in Norway, among others.
The company has worked with leading dry slop surface manufacturer Neveplast, whose centres include the famous slope on the green energy plant in Copenhagen, to created the new 470 metre long dry ski slope built using the company’s NP30 material.
Christened “SkiStar SummerSki” the Neveplast ski slope in the heart of Stockholm, will officially open to the public on Wednesday 7 September.
Served by a ski lift, the slope is one of Europe’s longest and largest by area with a skiable surface of 9,000 m2. It has been designed with variable gradients so that it is suitable for both less experienced skiers and athletes in training.
The 470m main slope has an 81m vertical between 10m and 91m of altitude and is served by a ski lift about 270 m long. There is also a 35m long nursery slope served by a carpet lift. In the most demanding part of the track, at the top, the slope reaches a 30% gradient, which eases to 20% in the central part (20%) and 8% in its lower section. The slope has a capacity of about 120 skiers.
In the upper part of the track, a “SkiStar Snow Park” snowpark of about 1500 m2 has also been built with features including rails, jumps and boxes. Jesper Tjader, a Swede and one of the best freeskiers in the world, pictured below, is to be the Ambassador of this new freestyle area.
Neveplast and Skistar share strong goals to be as sustainable as possible and the decision to use the NP30 material came in part because it is a sustainable and recycled product which can itself be recycled.
In fact, in response to SkiStar’s requests, Neveplast went beyond their previous already extensive environmental commitments and created a special “NP30 FREESKI SUSTAINABLE” surface, raising the bar even higher in terms of sustainability. In April this year the new NP30 FREESKI SUSTAINABLE product obtained the important ISCC PLUS (International Sustainability & Carbon Certification) certification.
An active promoter of a circular economy, the ISCC international standard aims to encourage the production and sustainable use, from an environmental, social and economic point of view, of all types of biomass in the various supply chains.
Neveplast’s renewable plastics, as far as the NP30 SUSTAINABLE product is concerned, is managed using a mass balance system through the production chain. This means that the link between certified incoming and outgoing material for each stage of the process is ensured by certification. For every ton of ISCC certified renewable plastic put into production, an equivalent quantity of finished product can be declared as ISCC certified.
“This is the first skiing facility built with the new Neveplast NP30_FREESKI_SUSTAINABLE, able to combine the feeling of skiing on easy and fun snow and an ecologically sustainable product. I am proud that Skistar has chosen our NP30_FREESKI and has decided to rely on the professionalism of the Neveplast team to carry out such an important project,” commented Niccolò Bertocchi CEO NEVEPLAST.
The investment is also part of a Skistar effort to double the number of days of skiing per year in Sweden with a target seven million days of skiing and sporting activity by 2030.
“We hope we can make the city a little more active and fun with exciting and inspiring attractions for anyone looking for the joy of movement and memorable experiences in the city centre. With this investment and thanks to our collaboration with Neveplast, we hope to be able to help more people to be active and at the same time enjoy the best views in Stockholm,” commented Stefan Sjöstrand, CEO and Group Manager of SkiStar.
