Golf balls. Didn’t think of that, didja.
Two years ago, a 16-year old diver named Alex Weber was swimming off Pebble Beach along the Pacific near Carmel, Calif. “My dad raised me underwater,” says Weber, and she means it. She’s a free diver: no scuba tanks; she just holds her breath. She was diving in a small cove and looked down and saw something weird. “You couldn’t see the sand,” she recalls, still sounding incredulous. “It was completely white.”
White with golf balls.
Pebble Beach isn’t near Carmel, it’s in Carmel – or, if you prefer, immediately adjacent to it, but both are small places. Of course Carmel is a town while Pebble Beach is a resort, but anyway, they’re cheek by jowl. You can walk up onto the golf course from Carmel Beach.
There were thousands of them. “It felt like a shot to the heart,” she says.
She was offended. Right then, she decided to haul them up. Thus began a Sisyphean task that went on for months: She and her father would haul hundreds of pounds of them up, and then of course more golfers would hit more into the ocean.
Not on purpose, but because the ocean is one big golf hazard. Pebble is a famous and popular course because it’s so challenging. All very well, but if they’re polluting the damn ocean, they should clean up after themselves.
Then she heard about a Stanford University scientist, Matt Savoca, who studied plastic waste in the ocean. She emailed him, and he came to look at her collection.
“Fifty thousand golf balls, just sitting in the garage,” she says.
Savoca was impressed. Weber recalls that he turned to her and said, ” ‘You should write a paper about this,’ and I was like, ‘Matt, I’m 16 years old. I don’t know how to write a scientific paper!’ “
So they worked together, which means he helped her haul tons of golf balls out of Carmel Bay. (It’s not the open ocean there, it’s a small bay; Carmel faces the bay and Pebble Beach is on the northern arm.)
Over two years, they found more than 50,000 golf balls. The source: five golf courses. Two along the coastline, and three up the Carmel River — those golf balls rolled underwater down the river to the ocean.
There are more than two along the coastline, so they weren’t even working the whole Monterey Peninsula. There are four Pebble Beach Company courses (or maybe 5, I’m not sure if Spyglass reaches the coast or not) and one municipal one. Lotta golf balls. Those other courses are on the open ocean, it’s only Pebble that’s on Carmel Bay.
In the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin,the team notes that golf balls are coated with a thin polyurethane shell that degrades over time. They also contain zinc compounds that are toxic. Savoca points out that the surf and currents act like a rock grinder and break down the golf balls. While chemicals from 50,000 or so golf balls will have only a small effect on the ocean, Savoca says they do degrade into microplastic pieces that marine animals could eat. The team also notes that there are lots of coastal golf courses around the world, so this may go beyond California.
Alex Weber, now 18 and a published author in a scientific journal, plans to apply to university to study marine science. In the meantime, she is still collecting, and keeping up her website. She says it is too bad the golf balls sink. If they floated, people would be shocked and outraged. “If a person could see what we see underwater,” she says, “it would not be acceptable.”
So what I want to know is, why aren’t the courses, or the parent company, simply required to clean up the golf balls? They make the big bucks by locating their courses on the ocean, so they can damn well clean up their toxic mess.
