Indian-American teen recycles 160,000 tennis balls into nonprofit success

When Prem Kamasani saw his tennis coach throwing away hundreds of used tennis balls after practice, he wondered whether they could be put to better use. Instead of letting them go to waste, the high school student decided to collect them. That small effort eventually grew into ‘BallBack,’ a student-run nonprofit that has built a nationwide network to collect and recycle discarded tennis balls. As reported by American media company Local Profile, Kamasani is a senior at Flower Mound High School in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas. He noticed that used tennis balls were regularly being thrown into dumpsters, even though they could be reused or recycled through specialised programmes. Tennis balls can take around 400 years to break down and generally cannot be placed in regular curbside recycling bins. Kamasani asked his coach if he could collect the balls instead.