One Designer Has a Great Idea for 3-D Printed Tennis Balls

You don’t have to dig too far to find the place where sustainability and tennis converge. When it comes to tennis balls, for instance, there’s an effort afoot to turn used balls into homes for harvest mice. Earlier this year, Inc. reported on the different ways that balls used in the French Open have found a second life in various forms. Dunlop has also recently announced an initiative to use more sustainable packaging for its products.

Rather than recycling existing tennis balls, what if there was a way to make tennis balls out of recycled materials? That’s what designer Noé Chouraqui came up with as part of the UAL Showcase for design students’ creations. His project is called Point, and it involves 3-D printing tennis balls and creating recyclable containers as part of a way to make the game more eco-friendly.

Chouraqui makes a convincing case for why creating recyclable tennis balls matters: existing tennis balls, he notes, can take up to 400 years to break down in landfills. According to the Fort Greene Tennis Association, 125 million tennis balls are discarded every year.

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The compostable material used to print these tennis balls is known as PLA-HR, and it’s a kind of filament that was specifically designed for tasks like this. Chouraqui notes that he worked with the International Tennis Federation’s Jamie Capel Davies to test these tennis balls, and found that his prototypes demonstrated “promising aerodynamic performance closely matching conventional tennis balls.”

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While some 3-D printed objects opt for a somewhat different look than their traditionally manufactured counterparts, these tennis balls don’t do that. According to Chouraqui, that was intentional. “Although the design of my ball doesn’t require them, since it’s made from a single material, I made sure to include the familiar felt lines to retain that visual connection,” he told Dezeen. Whether or not this can be replicated at a large scale, it’s an interesting approach to making a popular sport a little more ecologically sustainable.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…