How To Help One SMC Student Turning Pickleballs Into Puzzles

SAN CARLOS, CA — A student from Carlmont High School has come up with an ingenious way to save landfills from filling up with pickleballs and, as of Monday, has already diverted 1,800 from landfills.

Emily, a Carlmont High School student that did not share her last name, takes broken pickleballs destined for landfills and upcycles them into various puzzles such as tangrams, which consists of seven flat polygons that can be arranged into different shapes.

Look out for Emily’s Pickle Puzzles upcycling bins at Courts 1 and 2 at Red Morton Tennis and Pickleball Courts at 1120 Roosevelt Ave. in Redwood City, where pickleballers can drop off their broken balls rather than tossing them in the trash.

Pickleball is a fast-growing sport that comes with a hefty environmental cost due to most of them being made of low-density polyethylene, which is not easily recyclable through standard municipal programs.

Pickleballs can sometimes only last four or five games before they crack dude to aggressive play, hard court surfaces or temperature factors.