Kilmore Tennis Club has partnered with Game On Recycling to collect and recycle tennis balls by installing a collection unit at its clubrooms.
An estimated 10 million tennis balls are purchased in Australia each year, with almost all of them ending up in either landfills or waterways, eventually finding their way into the ocean.
Game On Recycling is a program formed through a partnership between the Australia New Zealand Recycling Program and Wilson Sporting Goods and is supported through a Federal Government grant as part of the National Product Stewardship Investment Fund.
People can dispose of their unwanted tennis balls using the club’s collection unit at its clubrooms at Kilmore’s JJ Clancy Reserve.
The balls are then sent to a processing facility, which will sort them as balls that can be reused and put back into circulation, or ones that have reached their end of their life and need to be recycled.
Kilmore Tennis Club president Gavin Moreira said the program had already shown some success in its short time of operation.
“In the first six months the club has recycled 1360 tennis balls just from a stockpile of old coaching and competition balls,” he said.
“We hope you will join us in our endeavours to reduce the amount of waste generated from old tennis balls and help us evolve tennis into an ecologically and environmentally aware sport.”
Reused tennis balls will be made available to community clubs, groups, institutions and organisations, helping to alleviate the cost of purchasing new equipment.
Tennis balls that need to be recycled will be granulated into small pieces and used in a range of manufacturing processes for sporting equipment, with Game On Recycling also conducting research to explore new uses for the recycled materials such as rubberised sporting surfaces.
All recycling and downstream processing is to be undertaken in Australia.
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