Nearly all of the 330 million balls made worldwide each year eventually get chucked in the garbage, with most ending up in landfills.
“It is true that virgin rubber is used because of the performance specifications required for the best in the world,” said Jason Collins, general manager of global racquet sports for Wilson Sporting Goods. “Other tennis balls within our product line absolutely can and do include recycled rubber.”
“We want to try and identify ways of making the consumption pattern more sustainable and the product more sustainable as well,” said Jamie Capel-Davies, the ITF’s technical head who works out of the federation’s lab in London. “While there is not a fully recyclable tennis ball that meets the performance specifications of elite athletes yet, we are proactively innovating for the future,” said Wilson’s Collins.
Some are sold as dog toys or for the bottom of chairs, some are ground up whole with the felt to be sold as footing for horse arenas, and still others are sent to a highly specialized, patent-pending machine that pulls the felt off the rubber and grinds the rubber into different-sized granules that have been made into a cushioning layer by the tennis court surfacing companyAnd other possible uses for the granules are being explored, such as using them in mulch, building materials such as stucco...
For the vast majority of balls that aren’t so lucky, Columbia University’s Themelis believes their final resting place should not be landfills but waste-to-energy plants that burn garbage to generate electricity. More widely used in Europe and China, Themelis says they handle only about 10% of the garbage in the U.S., where they have come under scrutiny because of concerns over emissions.
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