Recycling guide
Tennis makes more waste than it looks like from the baseline. Strings, balls, cans, grips, all of it piles up at every club in the country. Some of it can be recycled, some of it cannot, and the honest answer is different for each piece of kit. Here is the rundown, plus where to drop off used strings in San Francisco and the Bay Area.
Recyclable, but not at home
Polyester strings are plastic, so in theory they belong in the recycling stream. In practice they are too thin and too tangled for curbside sorting machines to catch, so they fall through and go to landfill. They need a facility that handles them on purpose. That is the gap String Savvy fills.
Not recyclable, but not plastic either
Gut strings are made from animal fibre rather than plastic. They cannot go in recycling, but they also are not adding plastic to landfill. Most players use polyester or a polyester hybrid, so check your stringer's label if you are not sure what came off your frame.
Not curbside recyclable
A tennis ball is rubber bonded to felt, and that mix is difficult to separate, so balls are not accepted in household recycling. Specialist programmes do exist, and dead balls also get a second life at schools, dog rescues, and as chair leg covers in classrooms.
Usually recyclable
The clear plastic tube is generally accepted in curbside recycling once it is empty. Rinse it, take the lid off, and check your local guidance if the can has a metal base or lid, since those sometimes need separating.
Not recyclable
Used overgrips are a mix of materials, soaked in sweat, and too small to sort. They belong in the bin. The savvy move here is using fewer of them rather than trying to recycle them.
A set of polyester strings lasts a serious player about two weeks. Then it gets clipped out, dropped on the floor of the stringing room, and swept into the bin. Multiply that by every player at every club and it adds up quickly, all of it plastic that will outlast the person who played with it.
The frustrating part is that the material itself is good. Polyester is the same family of plastic used in fabric, so once strings reach a facility that will take them, they can be turned into new material rather than buried. Recycled polyester is made with far less energy than new polyester, which is where the carbon saving comes from. Nobody was collecting strings, so we started.
If you play at one of our partner spots in San Francisco, look for the broken strings bin at the stringing bench and drop your set straight in. Ask at the desk if you cannot spot it.
If you run a shop, club, or stringing bench anywhere in the Bay Area, request a pickup and we will bring a bin to you and come by to empty it.
Outside the Bay Area, you do not have to wait for us. Collect a bag of polyester strings, print a shipping label from Let Tennis, and send them in yourself.
Whichever route you take, keep it to polyester strings, and keep them dry. There is no need to untangle them or clean them up first. A knotted ball of strings is exactly what we want.
The whole thing started with one question to one stringer in San Francisco. Ask what your club does with its broken strings, and if the answer is the bin, offer to change it. We will walk you through it.