Community | November 12, 2009 | 2 comments

Golf balls: 'Humanity's signature litter'

source: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/SPORT/11/04/littering.golf.balls/index.html

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"Research teams at the Danish Golf Union have discovered it takes between 100 to 1,000 years for a golf ball to decompose naturally. A startling fact when it is also estimated 300 million balls are lost or discarded in the United States alone, every year. It seems the simple plastic golf ball is increasingly becoming a major litter problem.
The scale of the dilemma was underlined recently in Scotland, where scientists -- who scoured the watery depths in a submarine hoping to discover evidence of the prehistoric Loch Ness monster -- were surprised to find hundreds of thousands of golf balls lining the bed of the loch."
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/SPORT/11/04/littering.golf.balls/index.html






The article does not describe it as a global problem.
Over a billion non-biodegradable golf balls end up in our waterways and oceans every year.
Golf courses use about two and a half billion gallons of water every day to keep the grass up to golfing standards, approximately 50 chemical preparations and pesticides are used heavily on it.
This causes contamination of soil and groundwater.
Not only that but some of these billions golf balls that end up in the ocean are swallowed by dolphins, whales and marine life is severely endangered by it.

Solutions:
Biodegradable golf balls and tees.



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2 comments // Golf balls: 'Humanity's signature litter'

  • masterzip
    • 0
      masterzip  

    • not all golf course use the pesticide practice,..afterall look at Justin Timberlakes new golf course that is "all green"
      most european courses that have been around for 200-300 years do not even need pesticides to exist because they built these to the natural landscape.
      finally,...the majority of new golf courses built in America have natural boundries for protected areas of habitat,...which seems environmental enough,...compared to 20 years ago when golf courses started out by completely stripping the landscape of everything living and then built it from the dirt up...(palm springs,....arizona,..las vegas...etc...)

      Now,..to address the golf ball issue...a major liter problem to me would mean that you can find golf balls everywhere,..like cigarette butts,...I can understand the accumulation of lost balls near a golf recreational facility,...but i do not see this as being a big litter problem....afterall,..when I go to look for an errant shot into the woods,..I generally find 2 or 3 balls that are considered "left or lost" and not mine,..as I am sure this happens to a lot of golfers....

    • 2 years ago
  • bailey78
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