Serve2Sustain: Transforming Tennis One Recycled Ball at a Time

NEW YORK, June 20, 2024 (Newswire.com) - Serve2Sustain, a non-profit started by high schoolers Shreyas Gorre and Ari Fayne, is helping propel tennis toward a greener future. The organization, with 20 members across seven states in the U.S., recycles worn-out tennis balls, also known as dead tennis balls, from tennis clubs and, with the help of their partner companies RecycleBalls and Laykold, turns what would otherwise have been waste into brand new tennis courts. Having recycled 110,000+ tennis balls over seven months at 11 tennis clubs and raised over $12,000, this national organization is growing rapidly and changing the game.

Co-founders Shreyas Gorre and Ari Fayne first conceived Serve2Sustain at the Wharton Global Youth Program for Entrepreneurship in 2023. This program taught them how to think like entrepreneurs by identifying a problem within their community and then creating a solution. The program gave them the skills to create presentations to raise funding, build a go-to-market strategy that allowed them to partner with clubs, and understand their target demographic which helped them to incentivize high schoolers to create chapters.

Gorre and Fayne, as avid tennis players, came up with the idea while playing tennis at the University of Pennsylvania. After hitting for a few hours, they wanted to dispose of their used tennis balls. Gorre and Fayne initially thought to place the balls in the readily accessible trash bin; however, they wondered if they could reuse the tennis balls in some way, which prompted them to draw up Serve2Sustain.

While the organization started with the goal of recycling tennis balls from tennis clubs in Gorre and Fayne’s local areas, it has since expanded using a chapter model in which each chapter has some autonomy within the larger organization. Every chapter is responsible for recycling tennis balls from their local tennis clubs, including communicating with clubs, picking up tennis balls, and shipping the balls to its partner companies that recycle them.

To start a chapter, please reach out to Serve2Sustain through their website or email. If you would like to make tennis a more eco-friendly sport, as the average cost to recycle a tennis ball is 4 cents per ball, please donate through Stripe or Venmo to @Serve2Sustain. Serve2Sustain is a registered 501(c)(3) so all donations are tax deductible. To stay up-to-date with Serve2Sustain be sure to follow their Instagram and LinkedIn.

Source: Serve2Sustain