Posted by
drpete on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 2:03:24 PM
CNN reports
here that golf balls are "humanity's signature litter".
Just in the United States alone, there are 300,000,000 golf balls lost each year. And it takes between 100 and 1,000 years for a ball to biodegrade. Moreover, in the core of the ball are harmful chemicals which, when released, can harm both flora and fauna.
Now, I've been an active supporter of both the
First Tee Program for kids and the
Wounded Warrior Project for wounded veterans and their families. Sorry, kids and sorry war heroes, I've gotta rethink here. We may well be endangering or injuring some snail darters and seaweed. Maybe, we need to at least mitigate the devastation by going to
treehugger.com to begin using biodegradable tees and balls.
Golfers could also contribute toward saving and sustaining the planet by leaving 13 clubs in the garage, and playing solely with a putter. Studies show that fewer balls are lost and fewer golfers are able to tee off since a typical putter-only round takes 11 hours to complete. Both the strategy and the unintended consequence result in fewer lost balls in the global aggregate.
I beg for some brainstorming about this
crisis. If guys don't go out with their buddies to engage in sports, we can assume that birth rates will increase and we could face a population-bomb
crisis. If guys get discouraged with golf and switch to tennis, this will result in a precipitous increase in CO
2 exhalation per player per hour, and the global-warming
crisis will be ever-more exascerbated. If golf-course revenues are seriously hurt, many might close and revert to being cow pastures. Uh-oh, worsening the precipitous methane
crisis. Algore alert!
Postscript!! Shortly after publishing the above, I tuned in to the Rush Limbaugh Program, and he started talking about this. Dr. Roy Spencer, Climatologist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, emailed Rush to inform that zinc -- the alleged dangerous chemical element in golfball cores -- is 95% of the content in a penny. And 400,000,000 pennies are lost each year. Now I could see that as justification for doing nothing about my golf game (such that it is) and golf charity. But, that's not how I am. I just want to add the admonition to my fellows that we avoid using pennies as ball markers.