Sherry Cai, '98, reflects on how she helped her daughters create a win for their sport and the environment
I’m Sherry Cai, a member of the Dartmouth Class of 1998 and Co-lead of Women of Dartmouth New Jersey Chapter.
I am sharing a story written by my two daughters about their non-profit, a tennis ball recycling business called Net Love. My daughters are Lily Liu (17) and Maggie Liu (16), students at New Providence High School in New Jersey.
The business has been growing steadily, and they recently reached the 50,000 recycled ball mark. They have also expanded three new chapters in California, Oregon, and Florida. Their Instagram account has 2,600 followers and continues to grow. They were chosen as Everyday Young Heroes by Youth Service America.
Below is what they wrote about Net Love.
My sister and I have been avid tennis players since we were young. We are now Singles #1 and #2 for the New Providence High School varsity girls’ tennis team. We love tennis deeply.
When we saw a documentary on YouTube about landfills, we were shocked to see pictures of tons of tennis balls scattered around the landfills. Really? Tennis Balls?
With further research, we learned that tennis balls, which we use almost every day, are a major pollutant! The furry strands on the outside of tennis balls are made of polyethylene terephthalate (or PET), the same material used for plastic bottles. As a result, if a tennis ball sits in a landfill, it will take at least 400 years to decompose! Even worse, there were 125 million used tennis balls put into landfills every year, just in the US, including the ones we threw into the trash when we felt their bounces were not ideal.
We decided to take action and created our non-profit organization, Net Love, to tackle this problem. In tennis, “love” means “zero”, so “Net Love” means “Net Zero”. We would like to make the sport we love a sustainable one for the future. We believe we can make a deep impact through Net Love.
We partner with Recycle Balls, which uses certain technology to remove the felt and repurpose the rubber core to build tennis courts and playgrounds. They typically charge $600/year for an unlimited supply of recycling bins. We reached out to many townships and tennis clubs to form a larger-scale “Tennis Ball Recycling Co-Op,” which charges an affordable annual service fee ($20-$60) from each member. Net Love consolidates used balls from members and ships them back to Recycle Balls. Members also receive a tax deduction of $0.40/ball in return.
We recruited a group of tennis players from our high school to join our efforts. They volunteer to help collect used tennis balls, remove them from tennis courts, and deliver them to designated places. Now Net Love has three new chapters established in California, Florida, and Oregon. My sister Maggie, COO of Net Love, has also added on Greencycle Craft to help promote tennis ball arts and crafts to young kids. We leverage Greencycle Craft as another great opportunity to educate young kids about the tennis ball recycling program.
Through many business competitions, we’ve won $15,000 in total awards from DECA Lead4change, Rider University Norm Brodsky Business Concept Competition, Seton Hall Pirate Pitch, Alfred University Business Leader Award, and others, all of which encouraged us to continue expanding our business. We are looking forward to using the funding to 1) find a spokesperson to support our cause in the pro tennis world; 2) support new chapters to recycle more used tennis balls in different States to reach our target of 2 million recycled tennis balls in total.
Thank you, Women of Dartmouth, for helping spread our story and achieve our goal!
