Used Tennis Balls

From Greenlight Magazine

Q: I manage an indoor tennis facility and read your suggestions for used tennis balls. They were all good ideas and I have done all those things in the past, a few dozen balls at a time. Now I'm looking for an outlet for a few thousand balls during the course of a year. I have a relatively small club. Do you have any suggestion for me?
— L. Boles

A: What a great question! And what a quandary for someone trying to live the good green life! Where do all the tennis balls go? Surely we all have a can or two sitting around somewhere. It would certainly pain me to consider consigning thousands of tennis balls to the dustbin on a regular basis. So what can we do when the ball loses its bounce? Penn, one of the world's largest tennis ball manufacturers, confirms that the combination of materials makes tennis balls largely un-recyclable. It's been suggested that tennis balls could be ground up to produce the soft forgiving surface so fashionable on playgrounds these days, yet there's no record of this actually being done.

But fear and fret not, dear readers. No problem is ever without a green-ish solution.

Recycling isn't always the be-all and end-all of green living. We spend a lot of time thinking about recycling and developing recycling programs. And there is something inspiring and slightly magical about taking old things and transforming them into shiny new ones. At the same time, however, we shouldn't let the concept of adaptive reuse to get lost in the mix. Finding new uses for existing things is always a big winner for the environment. When we use something again we get at least a two-for-one--think about the lives of clothes and furniture. This is where the wonder of the tennis ball truly comes to light. Behold the universe contained in this humble sphere! Here's a very incomplete list of what some tennis balls have been up to since retiring from the court:

• --Used in schools and other institutional settings to muffle the sounds of bare metal legs hitting hard surfaces. Organizations in both Canada and Japan have launched nation-wide drives to gather balls for this purpose.
• Used to fine tune the grip on canes and walkers.
• Linked together to make sound baffles and insulation panels.
• Feeding the needs of rescue dog organizations and humane societies. The pups don't seem to mind if the ball has lost its bounce.
• Placed on a telescoping pole to make an ingenious duster/cobweb remover. The texture is just right.
• Used to cover the ends of sharp or spiky objects. Child-proofers of the world, unite.
• Cut in half and filled with beer to make slug traps for the garden.
• Fitted with the proper entrance hole to create cozy, durable, and waterproof homes for dormice and harvest mice.

The sky, you see, really is the limit. Perhaps recycling centers could keep bins on hand for people to come get the balls and use them as they see fit. If we save them, the uses will appear. That's a lesson we would all do well to learn. — By Robert Johnston