Tennis balls are becoming more circular thanks to a Belgian eco-designer.
The world throws away about 300 million tennis balls each year, clogging up landfills, and taking an estimated 400 years to decompose.
France - which gets through 17 million tennis balls each year - has an upcycling project called L’Opération Balle Jaune that turns them into coatings for sports hall floors, and America has Project Green Ball that also repurposes discarded balls.
Now, there is a new player on the recycling court: Belgian Mathilde Wittock - a bio/ecodesigner and material researcher with a focus on sustainable innovation. She is an emerging designer bringing new life to unexpected materials, Icon reports.
Her innovative enterprise upcycles tennis balls into funky looking furniture. Mathilde's team can hand carve 1,800 balls per day into micro-cushioning elements for a chaise lounge or a bench - her two flagship products. Her benches look ideal for museums and airports, particularly as they are also rather good at absorbing sound.
They take around 2 to 3 weeks to make, but once they’re finished, they look both attractive and comfy. Better yet, the fuzz on the tennis balls are dyed to match each client's interior colours.
Mathilde receives donated tennis balls from sports clubs like the Federation of Wallonia in Belgium, which recently gave over its entire stock of 100,000 used tennis balls, which she says should provide for around 9 months of production.
“Eco-design is about circularity. You can use great materials that are low carbon emission or recycled, but you need to think of the end cycle,” she said. “If it’s not a circle, and if you can’t reuse (the elements) into something else, it’s not eco-design. It’s even worse, because it’s new materials.”