The way that’s angled, doesn’t it just immediately fill with water the first time it rains?

Why don’t they just change the tennis regulations to only use biodegradable materials?

So we’re just spreading trash in the environment and feeling good about it because it can be reused by other animals?

This just made me look up and learn about the environmental impact of tennis balls.

Every year, an estimated 300 million tennis balls are manufactured globally, and most of them end up in landfills. The rubber core is pressurized with air or nitrogen to give the ball its signature bounce. However, rubber itself is a challenging material to recycle, especially when combined with pressurization and other materials. The felt covering is partially synthetic (nylon), which contributes to the microplastic pollution problem. Synthetic fibers shed during play, adding to global plastic waste.

You will be glad to know that HOAs are almost unheard of in the UK and where they exist they’re usually nothing more than an organisation for tending to the village green, common areas and sometimes library book boxes.

This is green washing no matter how you slice it. While it’s an interesting idea, artificial refugia, like bat boxes or these balls, have to be very carefully designed so they don’t have one of these negative outcomes:

• Act as a trap for the targeted species with regards to predators
• Kill the target species - often through thermal extremes
• Just don’t get used by the target species

There’s some good work about this on (fuck, fine rummaging for paper) Australian quolls

I actually reached out to Cowan to asks a few questions. He was pumped that we were citing his work and using it in reclamation planning as landscape enchantments.

Anyway, artificial refugia should, at best, be viewed as a temporary fix, or a way to layer habitat on the landscape, never a full substitution.

I’d cheer to this but I put my nuts in a meatgrinder if these balls aren’t as full of microplastics as my braincells