Student comes up with posturepedic ottoman using discarded balls—a passion project for the environment
Originally published in TheDiarist.Ph
SYDNEY—400 years. That’s how long it will take each tennis ball to decompose, its nylon microplastics rotting in landfills. Top-seed players use new balls in every training session. During a match, they replenish four balls every seven games.
Now think about how many matches occur every day, how many recreational players there are, how many tennis clubs, schools, and so on exist in around 200 countries. In fact, according to a recent report, approximately 330 million tennis balls are produced each year. A Grand Slam event like the US Open, for example, uses nearly 100,000 tennis balls during the entire tournament!
I vividly remember how this discovery began, when I asked my tennis coach in school here in Sydney what they did with the baskets filled with balls to the brim, when they were replaced fortnightly. “Nothing really, maybe give them to the cricket team,” he said with a shrug. But walking around the grounds of the cricket pitch, I would take only five minutes to collect 33 balls rooted like trees, mounded with a thick layer of soil residue that camouflaged their neon-yellow color.
What can I even do with all these? There are only so many dog shelters I could send these balls to for them to play with—or even make a king-sized bed for each dog, with cargo ships left to spare.
It was almost too much of a cliche—a “hang on” epiphany just like in the movies where the protagonist stares at a blank wall and sees it suddenly filling up with images, as if one were completing a photo montage with this insane idea. I thought about it further— my mom’s lower back and feet always ache, so with its perfect balance of firmness and bounciness, she’d roll one of the tennis balls I’d leave lying around at home, over her, as a massage tool of sorts. Maybe I could expand this idea further and, thinking about its posturepedic and body support potential, start replacing the plastics in the foam used for everyday furniture?
Thus began the evolution of the CourtComfort cushion.
Working through my final two years of high school with world-renowned Philippine furniture innovators Lamana and Kenneth Cobonpue, I researched, developed, and patented a way to harness the core material of tennis balls and devise a pattern for installing them that would optimize their comfort-giving quality while maintaining the sleek aesthetics of home cushions. Rather than a one-off design and experiment, I am looking to bring sustainable relief to everyone on a scale that, many people have told me, has the potential to solve a global environmental issue, while simultaneously continuing to champion the sport that I live and breathe.
The CourtComfort project will be launched with the first sale of our ottoman prototype that the social enterprise my brother Joaquin started in 2019, and which I am now at the helm of, Bid for the Future (BFF), with Lamana, at Salcedo Auctions’ The Well-appointed Life on Sept. 14, 2024 at NEX Tower, Ayala Ave., Makati
You can view the catalogue and register to bid here: https://members.salcedoauctions.com/item/39603 Proceeds will go towards the development of sporting opportunities for talented Filipino tennis players to represent the country on the world stage following our successes at the Paris Olympics. With it, I hope we can foster a greater culture around sustainable living and support the potential of our talented youth.
