This planet is beset by problems. Uncontrollable industrial proliferation, religious intolerance, carpal tunnel syndrome, fossil fuel dependency.
But the real threat may be discarded tennis balls. In fact, if we don’t turn them all into chairs soon, the last human action may be a single hand thrust desperately from a bumpy yellow sea.
That is, at least, according to the Tennis Ball Chair project, whose founders tell us some 400,000,000 of the beloved spheres are hurled into the dark places beneath the earth each year.
I don’t want to scoff at legitimate concerns about resource waste. I just don’t think tennis balls are a significantly large enough part of the problem to incite consumers to want to buy a solution.
I also don’t want to scoff too much at the naivete of this pitch, because it’s actually a really sweet effort by a father and daughter to go into business together.
Unfortunately, it’s still rubbish:
The target market for this product is a fragile scrap of venn diagram confluence space connecting “people who play phenomenal amounts of tennis”, “people who are worried about the tennis ball waste crisis”, “people who can be arsed to save up 56 tennis balls, drill holes in them and make a chair” and “people who don’t really mind sitting on a bunch of tennis balls”.
Even if America’s tennis balls were all turned into furniture (and that would mean 7 million chairs per year), I imagine that most would end up in landfills later down the line anyway. Because, really, who’s going to pass these things on to their grandchildren?
Altogether, this project smacks of a good father building a ramshackle business rationale around his daughter’s realisation that “I guess you could make a chair out of tennis balls” to make a summer project that she’ll remember fondly for the rest of her life.
Sadly, it also reminds us that even in the soft-focus world of kickstarter, capital doesn’t change hands based on how sincerely the pitcher wants to do something.
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