Environmental impact of sports balls

Here’s a quick primer on sports balls, the materials of which they are made, and their environmental impact.

I’d suggest grabbing a hot cup of your favorite Fair Trade tea and then continuing to read below…

Sports balls consist of three main components:

The outer shell (synthetic leather ~30%)
The inner air bladder (rubber ~70%)
The dyes (<1%)

The vast majority of outer shells are “synthetic leather” - also noted as “PU” (petroleum) or polyester.

Bad news: this portion of the ball is a losing battle; no one makes any true leather sports balls anymore (for which we could pursue a “cruelty-free” certification process, work to minimize the environmental impact related to animals, child labor in tanning, chrome use in tanning, etc).
Good news: this only accounts for 30% of the overall component weight for a typical sports ball.
True leather balls are made, but if uncoated they are unsuitable due to water retention. For instance, for soccer the ruling body (FIFA) requires ~ 420g weight and a wet leather ball is easily double that. If the leather is coated, you are back to dealing with a synthetic product. There are one or two projects in Africa where they do make sense, because the leather is better able to deal with rough terrain and thorns, as does not have to face much rain.

About 300g out of the typical 420g full size soccer ball is rubber. And that’s a good thing when considering the environmental impact! Rubber is used both for the bladder (cheaper balls use artificial rubber: butyl) and for laminating the polyester plys onto the outer shell. We use butyl only for the little nozzle portion of the bladder - where you insert the inflation needle.

Our international group is pursuing Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification, which is required for source (plantation - manufacturer - trader) for the rubber portion of the sports balls. If successful, we will have FSC-certified balls by early next year. The rubber comes from trees, grown in plantations, and is processed into three distinct products:

crepe (sneakers),
RSS (tires and basketballs),
high ammonia (anything dipped, including bladders for sports balls)

We are pursuing a chain of custody for this rubber. The problem is finding a source for high ammonia, which is not easy. Our partner in the UK, Dr. Martin Kunz (one of the originators of the Fair Trade movement back in the 80s), has been trying for two years now to find this source.

Of course, we not only source the rubber as FSC, but also as Fair Trade (in Sri Lanka and India the rubber sources involved are on the FLO tea register, since they are into both products).

After we solve the FSC rubber project, we’ll move on to work on other related environmental impact issues with sports ball creation.