In June, the Greater Princeton & Far Beyond Branch of AYLUS (GPA) hosted a Tennis Balls Recycling event among communities across the State of New Jersey.
Do you know?
Nationwide, approximately 125 million used tennis balls wind up in America’s landfills every year. That is 20,000 metric tons of methane-producing, near non-decomposable rubber waste. U.S. tennis players recognize this as a significant environmental problem that no longer represents their sport in 2021.
U.S. tennis players want to be part of the solution and will recycle all of their balls if convenient courtside bins are available. Organizations also want to be part of a cost-effective green solution. In short, there needs to be an economical, universally adopted initiative to collect, recycle, reuse and publicize a national initiative–one that will inspire the US tennis community to change habits and stop trashing tennis balls.
GPA accepts used & unwanted tennis balls from schools, clubs, courts and ships the balls to West Virginia (recycleballs.org) to have some of the Tennis balls ground up, and then felt separated from the rubber. We call the rubber crumb generated; GREEN GOLD, for future use such as court construction. Other balls were reused as dog balls.
GPA Volunteers: Kevin He (6/2, 1 hr), Chenhao Luo (6/7, 1 hr), Max Xie (6/7, 1 hr), Gloria Wang (6/11, 3 hrs), Tiffany Tian (6/11, 1 hr), Michael Zhao (6/11, 1 hr), Erick Yan (6/15, 2 hrs; 6/19, 2 hrs), Annie Xu (6/16, 2 hrs), Frank Jinhao Zhang (6/16, 2 hrs)
