Tennis has a fuzzy yellow problem most players don’t think about when they open can after can of fresh balls, or when umpires at U.S. Open matches make their frequent requests for “new balls please.”
Because tennis balls are extremely hard to recycle and the industry has yet to develop a ball to make that easier, nearly all of the 330 million balls made worldwide each year eventually get chucked in the garbage, with most ending up in landfills, where they can take more than 400 years to decompose. It’s a situation highlighted by Grand Slam events like Flushing Meadows, which will go through nearly 100,000 balls over the course of the tournament.
That harsh reality in an age of heightened environmental awareness has sent ball makers, recyclers and the game’s worldwide governing body scrambling for solutions, and spurred sustainability activists to sound the alarm in online posts that pose the question: Are tennis balls a disaster for the planet?
I don’t know what you experience as green or yellow. To me those balls look like what I would label yellow (tho on the greenish side rather than the orangeish side), but for all I know, what I actually see is what you would call green. Just that I’ve been taught this color is yellow.
So what if everyone actually has the same favorite color range, they just use different labels for it because they were taught that’s what the color they are seeing is? (I don’t really think that’s how it works, but I don’t know that it isn’t because experience is subjective, and how would you really test it when color names are arbitrary? Fun to think about.)
That’s a thought I’ve always had a well, of we all actually like the same colours. Also could just be how you are raised. I remember calling tennis it green since I was a child and no one disagreed so the colour I see for a tennis ball, my brain sees as more green than yellow. It actually blew my mind when I first realized some people consider that colour to be yellow or at the very least closer to yellow.