Perhaps Congress needs to stop focusing on gas-guzzling cars, and start looking at golfers. Researchers with the Danish Golf Union have discovered it takes 100 to 1,000 years for a golf ball to decompose. Those numbers are shocking, when you consider that at least 300 million golf balls are lost or abandoned each year in the United States!
Personally, I never lose golf balls…but the rest of you hackers are seriously hurting the environment. The researchers found that during decomposition, the golf balls “dissolved” into hazardous heavy metals. Dangerous levels of zinc were found in the synthetic rubber filling used in solid core golf balls. Not a huge deal above ground…but when submerged under water, the zinc soaked in to the ground sediment and poisoned the surrounding plant life!
The research was started after a team found thousands of golf balls at the bottom of Loch Ness.
I think this is potentially bad news, but maybe not as bad as you think. In most scenarios, on a golf course with man-made water hazards, this is a non-issue because golf balls are harvested by divers and resold – they don’t have a chance to decompose and poison the water. But on courses with rivers, oceans, and bodies of water that divers can’t recover balls from, this could be potentially dangerous.
I’m not one to get my panties in a bunch about the need for everything to be “green.” But there’s no denying the effect (small as it is) that golf balls could have in certain environments. That said, one thing is for sure: if a company releases a “green” golf ball, plenty of people will buy it no matter what the cost!
What do you think?