> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://terawatttimes.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Making Every Ball Count: From Recycling to Collective Action - URL: https://terawatttimes.org/making-every-ball-count/ - Published: 2026-10-27T14:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-27T15:00:02.000Z - Description: A tennis ball’s life on court is short, but its rubber and felt remain. Ella Jiawei Chen traces how a player’s question became the GreenCourt Initiative, research into whether ball recovery cuts emissions, the GreenCourt Certified standard, and a method others can carry further. - Author: Ella Jiawei Chen - Tags: Emerging Voices *By: Ella Jiawei Chen (Lower Merion High School, Ardmore, Pennsylvania 19003; GreenCourt Initiative, Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania 19004)* ## The Ball After the Match A tennis ball has a short life on the court. Once it loses the bounce players need, it is replaced, usually without a second thought. The old ball does not disappear, though. Its rubber core, felt cover and glue are still there, and someone eventually decides what happens to them. For a long time, I never asked who that someone was. I love tennis, and playing it is how I started to notice how many balls we go through. The sport is precise about almost everything on the court: ball size, weight, bounce and deformation all have published specifications. Where a ball goes after it stops meeting them is left to whatever arrangement a facility happens to have. That contrast stayed with me. If we can be this exact about how a ball performs, we can give some thought to where it goes afterward. That question led me to start the GreenCourt Initiative, now a registered nonprofit. The hope I wrote on our website is still the simplest version of what I want: for people to enjoy tennis without leaving a mess behind for the planet. I wanted used balls to have a better destination, and I wanted recycling to be something a player could join without organizing a whole project. At the time, I thought of it as a problem in a sport I loved. I had little idea how much it would teach me about organizing people, measuring environmental outcomes and building systems other people could use. Caring about the problem turned out to be the easy part. A player who wants to recycle needs somewhere to put old balls; a club needs a way to collect, store and ship them; a program needs people who keep it running after the first burst of enthusiasm. Some of our partner clubs are close to home: High Performance Tennis Academy is in Bala Cynwyd, where GreenCourt is based, and the Julian Krinsky School of Tennis is nearby in Narberth. Building GreenCourt meant working through those details with clubs like these and connecting what we collected to recycling channels. The network grew from there, local students joined as chapter leaders and ambassadors, and GreenCourt has now diverted more than 30,000 used tennis balls from landfill. Recovered tennis-ball materials can be used in products such as court surfaces and playground turf. By the time we reached 30,000 balls, GreenCourt had become something other people could join and help sustain. Players did not need to understand the whole recycling process to contribute, clubs did not need to build anything from scratch, and students could take charge of projects in their own communities. What had once required my attention could now involve people working at different clubs, on different schedules, with different responsibilities. Sometimes the distance between caring about a problem and doing something useful is simply the absence of a practical way to begin. ## What Collection Achieves As the program grew, a harder question followed. Counting collected balls was easy; knowing what they achieved was not. How much material did we actually recover? Did the recovered rubber replace new material, or something that would have been recycled anyway? And once processing and transport were included, when did the effort produce a net climate benefit? Those questions led me into research on what tennis balls are made of, the routes their materials can take, and the conditions under which recovery cuts greenhouse gas emissions. A used ball can go several ways: its rubber might end up in a court surface or a playground, and each application may replace a different material. The answer turned out to depend less on how many balls we collected than on what the recovered rubber ends up replacing, and on the processing and transport along the way. One finding mattered most to me. When we assumed that tennis-ball rubber replaced recycled tire rubber doing the same job, recovery did not reach climate break-even, even before transport was counted. Under the conditions we examined, the emissions associated with recovery exceeded the climate benefits of that substitution. It made me look more carefully at what a recovered material actually replaces, rather than assuming that every additional ball collected produces the same environmental result. The result changed how I talk about our work. A recycling program can divert real waste and produce useful material without delivering the climate benefit people expect. Those are different achievements, and I wanted GreenCourt to report each one for what it is. The research also gave us a better way to examine other recovery routes: identify the material being displaced, account for what happens during processing, and then test whether the claimed benefit holds up. Tennis offers one way to see a problem that appears across the low-carbon transition. As we change how we produce energy, make materials and move goods, good intentions and visible activity do not always tell us where emissions actually fall. We need to know which technologies work, what a new material displaces and how results shift when conditions change. Research helps us answer those questions, including when an attractive solution needs to be reconsidered. ![](https://terawatttimes.org/content/images/2026/10/2.webp) ## A Standard Others Can Use Research led to a practical question of its own. If another club wanted to start a program, how would it measure the results? If ten facilities reported in ten different ways, nobody could compare them. And if GreenCourt one day worked with hundreds of facilities, it could not rely on a few people checking every decision by hand. That is why we built GreenCourt Certified, a certification for tennis facilities. Its accounting method separates three outcomes: the mass of balls diverted from disposal, the material recovered through recycling, and avoided production supported by evidence that recovered balls or materials actually replaced another product or material. Each has its own calculation rules and records. To earn credit, a club must divert at least 75 percent of its used balls, or 90 percent for the higher option, and the organization that receives them must confirm receipt in writing. The wider system also covers reuse, procurement and education. Keeping these outcomes apart determines what a club can report. The number of balls a club diverts is something it can count. How much rubber is recovered depends on where those balls go and how they are processed. Sending old balls to a recycler does not, by itself, establish that fewer products were made. That claim requires separate evidence about what was actually replaced, whether through reuse or through recovered material taking the place of something else. A small club can report its results using the same distinctions as a much larger facility. A small project can run on conversations and memory. A larger one needs people to know what is expected, how to do the work, what to record and how to judge their own results. At one facility, a staff member might oversee the collection; at another, the work might be organized by students. Both should be able to follow the same reporting rules and understand what their numbers mean. I want someone joining GreenCourt for the first time to be able to use the method, and someone taking over a chapter to be able to continue without starting from zero. That is what building the certification has meant to me: making what we have learned usable in places I will never visit. ## Change That Travels What interests me now is what people outside GreenCourt can do with what we have learned. I would be glad to see a hundred clubs, or a thousand, manage their old balls responsibly. I would also like schools and local groups to use what we have developed without asking GreenCourt to manage the work. A useful method should be something others can adapt and improve. Close to home, that could begin with a student who has never worked on an environmental project. With a clear method, a few willing partners and a school prepared to help, the student could bring other students into a project they might never have tried on their own. A tennis club could treat ball recovery as part of normal operations, rather than leaving it to whichever volunteer is free that week. If nearby facilities share what they learn, the next one may avoid mistakes the first one had to work through. People do not need the same motives to work toward the same result. One person cares about climate change; another wants cleaner courts or a better place for children to play. A recycling entrepreneur may see a business in discarded materials, and a school may value what students learn by running something real. Someone may simply be tired of seeing bins of old balls thrown away when there might be a better option. I welcome all of these reasons. They bring different people into the same work, often with skills and resources that an environmental group would struggle to provide on its own. Take collection and transport. Picking up used balls from a single club may not justify a regular trip. A company serving several clubs in the same area could combine their collections, spread transport costs across customers and develop a more dependable service. With predictable pickups, clubs could rely on the service instead of organizing each collection themselves. Whether it becomes a viable business depends on volumes, costs and demand for recovered material. If it does, the work can support paid jobs. Its environmental benefits would still need to be measured. Public institutions have choices of their own. A school board or parks department can open its courts to a pilot program, pay for collection bins, introduce community groups to service providers or write equipment recovery into a facility's operating agreement. Public purchasing can take account of product durability, reuse and the availability of responsible end-of-life handling. A parks department might begin by allowing students to test collection at a handful of public courts. If the arrangement works, it could become part of the next facility management agreement. Equipment recovery would then have a defined place in the way those public courts are managed. I see a connection here to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: responsible consumption and production (SDG 12), climate education and capacity-building (SDG 13), and partnerships among public bodies, businesses and civil society (SDG 17). A student needs permission to place a collection bin, a club needs someone to take its retired balls, and a recycler needs enough material to make a route worthwhile. Those are everyday decisions through which larger commitments can take practical shape. For sports facilities, one principle would go a long way: responsibility for equipment should not end when it stops being playable. A club can start with a collection point, a dependable processing partner and a plain record of where its retired balls go. The arrangement should be clear enough for the person opening the facility on a Monday morning to know what to do with a full bin. Written into facility guidelines, it can survive changes in staff, students and volunteers. Students have a real part in this. Through GreenCourt's chapters and ambassador roles, they set up collection programs, work with nearby clubs and organize their communities. Along the way they learn to approach institutions, build partnerships, solve problems and check results, skills that outlast any single project. They should also be able to hand the work over. A new chapter leader needs records, contacts and a clear understanding of the collection process, not just an enthusiastic message from the person who came before. Schools can help with that continuity, facilities can make room for collection in their operations, and recycling professionals can handle the technical work beyond a volunteer's reach. When local officials support a successful pilot, the students' work can become a regular part of community life. I hope the work reaches people with no interest in tennis at all. Someone else's starting point might be clothing waste, school food, electronics or energy use. A school cafeteria faces different problems from a tennis club, and collecting electronic waste requires different expertise. GreenCourt's procedures will not fit every case. But asking where discarded materials go, finding people who can help, checking the results and recording what works are habits that can be learned and shared. The next student who notices a problem should have more to begin with than a good intention. I hope that one day a student who starts a collection program at school can graduate knowing the work will continue. Another community may use what GreenCourt has learned, adapt it to local facilities and improve parts that do not work well there. A club that manages retired balls as routinely as it maintains its nets would be a meaningful result. So would a school that helps students turn their ideas into programs lasting beyond a single school year. A full collection bin is only the beginning; someone still has to arrange transport and confirm where the balls go. At the local level, I have learned to ask who will do the work, what support they have and how the results will be checked. Those questions have followed me through GreenCourt, and they will matter to projects much larger than ours. If you play tennis, ask where your club's old balls go, and help set up a collection program if there is none. If you are a student, find a problem near you and a few people willing to help. If you run a facility, a business or a school board, you may be able to give a small project a place to operate, a chance to prove itself or the modest support it needs to grow. Whatever brought you to the issue, you can begin with something you know and somewhere you belong. Try a practical idea, pay attention to the results and leave a way for someone else to carry the work forward. I started with a used tennis ball. The next change could begin with something right in front of you. ![](https://terawatttimes.org/content/images/2026/10/3.webp) ## References and Further Reading - United Nations. Sustainable Development Goal 12: Responsible Consumption and Production, Targets 12.5 and 12.7. - United Nations. Sustainable Development Goal 13: Climate Action, Target 13.3. - United Nations. Sustainable Development Goal 17: Partnerships for the Goals, Target 17.17. - GreenCourt Initiative. [https://green-court.org/](https://green-court.org/?ref=terawatttimes.org) - Chen, E. J., Whitaker, C., and Liu, A. Y. (2026). *Climate Break-Even Conditions for End-of-Life Tennis Ball Recovery: Core Formulation, Functional Substitution and Collection Logistics*. Working manuscript, Terawatt Times Institute. - Chen, E. J., Gao, Z., and Whitaker, C. (2026). *Quantifying the Waste-Diversion Impact of a Tennis-Facility Certification: A Tiered Accounting Framework for GreenCourt Certified*. GreenCourt Initiative.