MIN sits down with Ryan Luter, director of business development at Supersede, to discuss the firm’s marine-grade plywood replacement.
Phoenix, Arizona-based Supersede makes a one-to-one replacement for plywood, using 100 per cent recycled materials with a core of recycled polypropylene and glass fibre. The company won the Manufacturing, Support Products & Materials at the DAME Design Awards 2025 for its engineered, extruded sheet crafted from plastic waste. Unlike other non-wood products on the market, the company claims this product is comparable to plywood in every way, including cost.
Now used by boat builders, RV manufacturers, cargo trailer manufacturers, horse trailer manufacturers and more, it was designed initially for land construction. “Two of the three founders grew up in a family of contractors and were familiar with the struggles and inconsistency of wood, both in performance and availability and pricing,” says Luter.
“We started the company with construction in mind, but because of its nature in the marine industry, there is such a need for it. We have plant number two coming in Q1, and we have infancy plans for plant number three in Q4 of 2026.
‘”Because of its nature in marine, there is such a need for it, there are enough boards to have planted five, six, seven, eight, nine and 10 just supplying marine development.”
Plant number two will offer a thinner and thicker variation of the board (the current specs are available on the company’s website). “We’re going up to one inch, and we will offer a three-eighths, mostly for the RV industry,” Luter explains.
Currently, it comes in black. “But if there’s a business case for another colour, it’s easy for us to do because our manufacturing process is unique. It’s a co-extrusion with two extruders that could theoretically produce different colours or UV-resistant materials.
“The company was founded by three brilliant engineers,” he says. “We offer a lot of technology that is not normally available in this industry, meaning we can model a lot of testing for builders that we can electronically and graphically design into a model and show them what the results would be in comparison to different materials.
“We were able to design the board that way. The concept is to drop [Supersede] in place of equivalent plywood and continue doing exactly what you’re doing with plywood.” This means the same fasteners, the same tools, the same glues, the same laminates, paint even, sanding. “It does all of these things with the same bits and blades and fasteners that you would use in plywood. And for roughly the same cost.”
Europe and Australia buying into the plywood replacement
He says “very big companies” in the marine sector are using the product, and while the American venture has grown a strong domestic market, it’s also exporting to Europe and Australia for marine manufacturing.
That said, Supersede is still “learning” the marine industry. The company launched its marine product in 2024, although it had been four years in the making.
“We’re trying to gain traction in glass boat building, where the majority of volume actually is. In order to support the market globally, we would eventually like to have plants in Europe.
“It is recyclable itself, and we buy back cutoffs and scrap so manufacturers can have a zero-waste programme or contribute toward that,” Luter says. “We formulate it back into itself.”
He explains that the whole concept of Supersede is scalability. “It’s a very minute footprint,” which Luter says means the company is green, not only in material but in process as well. “Our production plant is one one-hundredth the size of a lumber yard that produces the same amount of product. The actual production line is less than a hundred feet long.”
And what makes it attractive to boatbuilders, above its performance qualities, is that “Lumber today in the US is very depressed, and the cost is very low. But who knows what it will be six months from now? If you’re a buyer of this [Supersede], you put this in your bill of material, you’ll know what it’ll be a year from now and a year after.”
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