Noé Chouraqui developed POINT, a completely 3D-printed tennis ball designed to reduce tennis-ball waste. Over 300 million tennis balls are manufactured annually, each taking roughly 400 years to decompose, and most are discarded after weeks of play. POINT replaces the traditional hollow rubber core and felt with a single-material High Resilience PLA made from corn starch that is industrially compostable and reduces environmental impact by about 90 percent. The single-material construction eliminates complex recycling, while internal structures and printing settings were tuned to preserve bounce, flight, neon-yellow appearance, and seam lines to maintain player recognition. The design earned a patent.
His solution is POINT - a completely 3D-printed tennis ball that could revolutionize how we think about sports equipment and sustainability. The staggering reality is that over 300 million tennis balls get manufactured every year, and each one takes 400 years to break down once tossed away. Most end up rotting in landfills after just a few weeks of play. It's an environmental disaster hiding in plain sight, one that Chouraqui realized needed addressing without sacrificing the performance players demand.
POINT tackles this waste through smart material science. Instead of the usual hollow rubber core wrapped in felt, Chouraqui uses High Resilience PLA made from corn starch. This bio-based filament can be composted industrially and cuts environmental impact by 90 percent. The single-material construction eliminates the recycling nightmare of traditional multi-component tennis balls while maintaining familiar bounce and flight characteristics. "PLA-HR is eco-friendly, as it is compostable under industrial conditions and has a lower carbon footprint than traditional plastics," said Chouraqui.
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