Veolia Environmental Services is the official sustainability partner for the PPA, and the partnership has been incredibly impactful on the professional tour.

Along with helping the PPA go green, Veolia Executive Vice President of Communications and Chief Communications Officer, Carrie Griffiths, recently shared a fascinating development at the 2024 Pickleball Business Forum.

Veolia is recycling pickleballs. 

“We went to our first PPA tournament in Phoenix and saw that pickleballs are made of plastic and that the pros are playing at such a high level that they were cracking them pretty regularly,“ said Holly Bertschmann, Senior Communications Specialist at Veolia. “We work in water waste energy, so we reached out to some folks in our hazardous waste division and we picked their brain on what we could do with pickleballs.“

With the increasingly high number of pickleball players across the nation who are playing, cracking, and frequently buying more pickleballs, there’s got to be an incredibly high number of them ending up in landfills. 

“Our waste team basically cut apart some pickleballs to figure out what they were made of and realized they were similar to some other projects we do,” added Bertschmann. 

“We specialize in recycling difficult materials, like wind turbine blades, electronics, batteries, LED lighting, and medical waste. Basically, we take waste and we turn it into something that can be reused or safely disposed of,” said Griffiths. “For example, we might get a bunch of stuff from the manufacturer that they can’t sell, so we take them and turn them into something else. We found a market with manufacturers of cement and they were more than happy to take the pickleballs because they can break it down and use it as fuel.”

This discovery isn't only changing the PPA Tour, it’s going to impact the sport across America. Veolia saw a problem and had the expertise to solve it.  

“We are developing boxes that are branded for the PPA Tour that are weather resistant where people at tournaments can drop their used and cracked pickleballs into the top,” said Griffiths. “Once the box is filled, they can be shipped to the Veolia facility.”

These bins that hold about 250 pickleballs each also have a prepaid shipping label on them to be sent back to the Veolia facility where the team processes them.

“Once they get to us, we go through all the balls. If they’re still usable, we’ll donate them to a local YMCA or charity, but if they’re not, we’ve got a process where we actually grind them up with other materials, take this mix of ingredients, and give it to cement kilns and cement manufacturers, which they use in place of coal to reduce their CO2 footprint,” explained Griffiths.

If the bins are successful on tour, they could easily pop up across the country at local pickleball facilities to greenify the sport at every level.

“It’s a win-win. It’s a great opportunity to take care of something that people are just throwing away, and we’re giving it another life,” concluded Griffiths. “We’re making history right now and we’re saving the planet.”