Vermont nonprofit RecycleBall teams up with Wilson Sporting Goods to help recycle tennis balls.
By: Heather Newgen | Twitter: @hnvoluntourist
Tennis is widely recognized as one of the most popular sports with more than 17 million players in the United States according to the Tennis Industry Association, but ever think about what happens to all those balls? Nationwide, approximately 125 million used tennis balls wind up in America’s landfills every year, the New York Times reports. That is 20,000 metric tons of methane-producing, near non-decomposable rubber waste, making tennis one of the sporting world’s largest generators of solid waste.
Retired businessman Derrick Senior, from Shelburne, Vermont, is an avid player and realized one day that the sport he loves has an unsustainable habit. “In tennis, you open a can of balls, play with them for an hour and a half, and then you toss them out,” explained Senior, who’s on the court four or five days a week.
In 2016, he founded RecycleBalls, an organization that makes it easy for tennis facilities and players around the country to collect, recycle, and reuse their balls. RecycleBalls, whose mission is to recycle and reuse all balls nationwide, provides its partner facilities with free recycling bins which, once full, get shipped to RecycleBalls at no cost.
“Finally, after a ball has had its last bounce, it can be recycled and used again instead of rolling into a landfill,” Senior told The Voluntourist. “Our business is to recycle, but we’re mainly an activist organization,” he said. “We want to change behavior, not just turn something old into something new.”
Senior is ideally suited to this bold mission, having spent more than three decades working in manufacturing, branding, national distribution, and customer service. Each day, he receives a UPS delivery of a pallet or two of recycling bins, each of which contains 24 bins, or 4,800 tennis balls at his 9,000-square-foot warehouse.
Once the balls arrive at RecycleBalls, an innovative PLAY IT GREEN machine separates the components of the ball, removing 99% of the felt from tennis balls at the rate of 8,000 balls per hour. The resulting crumb rubber product called GREEN GOLD, can be used for a variety of applications, including Laykold tennis courts, and rubber form sign bases. Green Gold may also be used as a natural pebble rubber mulch for playgrounds and, potentially, equestrian arena surfaces. The patent-pending PLAY IT GREEN machine was installed after two years of R&D.
In just three years, RecycleBalls has built a nationwide network to more than 1,000 partners from nearly every state. The network’s growth is in large part due to the greater tennis community’s desire to be a part of the landfill solution. And that desire also got the attention of Chicago-based Wilson Sporting Goods, the world’s largest manufacturer of tennis gear, who signed on as the program’s lead sponsor and partner. Together, they have already collected two million tennis balls.
“This has been an amazing ride over the last three years. Our network partners make all of this possible and I am reminded daily of the amazing effort and dedication that so many have given to this cause,” Senior said. “Wilson and RecycleBalls are making a commitment to keep tennis balls out of landfills and repurposing them into socially relevant products like tennis courts, playgrounds, turf, and more. “We are solving a national problem right now,” he added. “That’s what drives me and so many others, to inspire people to change their habits.”
In February 2019, RecycleBalls was one of four nonprofit organizations nominated as an environmental finalist in the prestigious 2019 Halo Awards, North America’s highest honor for corporate social initiatives and cause marketing and showcases successful consumer engagement and employee engagement efforts.
For more information, please visit www.recycleballs.org.