Snow-generating stickers help fight climate change effects in ski resorts
With climate change threatening ski towns around the world, recent design graduate Tanay Wadodkar has created a small-scale geoengineering intervention in the form of snow-generating stickers.
Wadodkar's Snow Seeds project, begun while he was in the Material Futures programme at Central Saint Martins (CSM), explores how surface finish technologies can be used for cloud seeding – a form of weather modification where substances are dispersed into the air to encourage localised rain or snowfall.
Wadodkar's stickers contain a mineral salt made from silver and iodine that is suspended in a water-soluble ink that forms the product's top layer.
When this ink dissolves on exposure to snow on the ground, the mineral salt stays intact, sitting on the snow and, as it evaporates, entering the air and going up into the clouds, where it attracts water to form snowflakes.
Wadodkar was driven to create Snow Seeds by his love for snowboarding and the Kashmiri village of Gulmarg in the Himalayan Mountains, where he first discovered the sport.
In recent years, the designer had noticed the village's slopes were looking bare at a time of year when the trees should be buried – an experience that he soon learnt is being echoed in ski resorts and mountain towns around the world, due to a combination of climate change and overtourism.
According to one peer-reviewed study, about 13 per cent of current ski areas are projected to lose natural annual snow cover entirely and another 20 per cent to see theirs halved by the end of the century.
This affects not just winter sports enthusiasts but the local communities that make their living from those economic and cultural activities, Wadodkar said.
"This project comes from a place very close to my heart," said Wadodkar. "The sport of snowboarding has given me some of the best experiences of my life, testing me physically and mentally over the years."
"Spending time in the mountains gave me a different perspective on life and also showed me the big effects of climate change on a part of the world that seems to be unchanging and eternal."
Wadodkar's invention takes the idea of geoengineering, which involves large-scale interventions to counteract the effects of climate change, and imagines it on a smaller-scale level rooted in community action.
Typically, cloud-seeding operations are conducted from aircraft or drones, where they are separated from people's lives and often use a high amount of energy.
The stickers are a low-carbon alternative that would allow snow sports enthusiasts and locals to work together to respond to their observations about what the environment needs in real time.
"To me, geoengineering is a process that has to be done with careful intention, measuring every effect that it will have on the people and the environment," Wadodkar told Dezeen.
"It could be used in a way of changing the environment, greatly differently from any form that it had previously taken," he continued.
"The other way of using it is to form partnerships, creating relationships that aim to counteract the negative effects of human activities, and the steps being taken are to restore nature to its healthy form."
Wadodkar hopes to develop his invention into a surface finish that can be used on the top of snowboards and skis, similar to how wax is used on their bottom.
Currently, he is in the process of lab testing his sticker prototype to measure the efficiency of the suspension and evaporation before he takes it into a real-world setting.
The graphic design on the current sticker prototypes is a mountain range rendered in the style of a topographic map, showing peaks and valleys in a two-dimensional representation. The sticker changes colour as its top layer of ink dissolves.
Wadodkar graduated from CSM's masters programme in Material Futures in 2025 and was a finalist in the college's MullenLowe NOVA Awards, recognising fresh creative talent.
His invention may be popular among athletes at the current Winter Olympic Games, given that a new World Economic Forum report has flagged that fewer venues are likely to be able to host the event in an era of climate disruption.
This year's event is located in the Italian city of Milan and town of Cortina and has been used as a venue to showcase an innovation in alpine shelters from Carlo Ratti and an inflatable jacket that adapts to different temperatures from Nike.
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