Dear tennis players,
We’re happy to announce that we collected 500+ tennis balls last season with our pilot recycling project, and it seems that people are enthusiastic to continue donating. We’d like to thank the City of Vancouver for allowing such a project at Queen Elizabeth Park and Kitsilano Beach. We thank the Vancouver School Board for accepting tennis ball donations thus far!
It is now time to iterate and improve on our efforts. We have temporarily removed the recycling bins from the tennis courts at Queen Elizabeth Park and Kitsilano Beach in order to implement our learnings from this project’s run in 2023. However, we continue to accept donations of 50+ tennis balls, please contact us if you’d like to do so.
Lessons learned from 2023
1. Finding organizations to accept tennis balls takes time, dedication, and networking. Going forward, we will have organizations confirmed and ready to accept tennis ball donations before collecting them.
2. Bins on public tennis courts are vulnerable to weather and vandalism. We will redesign the recycling bins to be more resilient and secure.
3. People donated many tennis balls and the bins overflowed. We will establish a better system for the notification and monitoring of bin fill volume.
4. People used the bins as trash cans in some cases. We will look to better establish with the community that the bins are not for anything other than tennis balls, and will seek to encourage the city to install more proper recycling and trash bins.
Next steps
We are firstly seeking information regarding local organizations who will accept moderately-to-heavily used tennis ball donations.
Please email van.tennis.society@gmail.com or text 778-798-6520 with information.
Thank you very much,
Nick Tchernikov
President
Author: nickt
President of the Vancouver Tennis Society