They are often competitive casualties cast aside after a match, but tennis balls are bouncing back to life thanks to a recycling center as big as a ball machine.
Meet the Green Machine.
The brainchild of reBounces, a Harrison, Ark.-based company founded by Bill Dirst, Grant Garland and Cannon Fletcher, the Green Machine is the centerpiece of an initiative to recycle tennis balls and offer them at discounted prices. The tennis-playing friends from “The Natural State” are trying to transform trash into treasure with a patented re-pressurization system that recharges balls in three days.
“My buddy, Bill Dirst, was helping coach a high school team,” says reBounces marketing chief Garland. “They had no budget, so everything was coming out of his pocket. Practice balls are the biggest recurring expense for those programs. He’s a tinkerer so he started working on ways to recharge balls and eventually refined it.”
While it’s not exactly a tennis ball defibrillator—the Green Machine won’t bring a completely dead ball back to life—it can restore pressure to balls and extend their lifespan. It retails for $5,000 and has a 400-ball capacity, but you don’t have to get the machine to go green—reBounces sells recharged balls at low rates: 100 balls for $45, 250 balls for $100 and 500 balls for $185.
“It literally takes five minutes to operate,” says Garland. “You put the balls in, turn it on and walk away for three days. When you come back, the balls are recharged. Obviously, the recharged ball is not going to last like a brand new ball, but we’ve found you can get three weeks of additional use from the re-pressurized ball and then, depending on the quality of the ball, it can be recharged again and again.”
What happens to old balls when they lose their bounce? Not much. Some serve as fetch toys for dogs, some are donated to Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs and schools, others wind up on walkers in retirement homes and rehab centers, and you may even spot a few covering trailer hitches or riding shotgun on top of car antennas. But the majority of old balls often form felt-and-rubber waste pools in landfills.
About 300 million tennis balls are manufactured annually. It is estimated that nearly 20,000 metric tons of tennis ball waste is produced each year, which is largely non-biodegradable. To put that into perspective, you could fill every Grand Slam stadium with old balls and still have some left over. Looking to combat that stat, ReBounces partnered with BNP Paribas, title sponsor of the Indian Wells tournament, two years ago and launched a recycling effort at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden.
“For every six used balls spectators brought in, we gave them a can of brand new balls,” Garland says. “We collected more than 3,000 balls in 2009 and more than 15,000 balls in 2010.”
That number should soar in 2011, as BNP Paribas and Rebounces are hosting “Rally, Roundup & Recycle,” a tennis ball recycling competition among tennis clubs, school tennis teams, community tennis programs and other tennis organizations in the Southern California area. The goal of the competition, which runs until February 28, is to collect 100,000 or more used tennis balls—the approximate quantity of balls used during the first two years of BNP Paribas’ sponsorship of the tournament and the projected usage for the 2011 event. The three programs that collect and send the most used balls will be recognized on Stadium Court and receive access to a luxury suite.
ReBounces invites you to send your old balls to them, which they will recycle for free. If you want the balls recharged and returned, their standard rates apply (100 balls for $45, 250 balls for $100 and 500 balls for $185).
“We offer free recycling to everyone in the country,” Garland says. “Just email us and we will send you a free shipping label, so it doesn’t cost you anything to send us your old balls. We sort through the balls, cherry-pick the ones we can re-pressurize, and the next level of balls that are beyond recharging go to schools and adult care facilities.