PEBBLE BEACH — At Pebble Beach Golf Links, even the most skilled golfers have hit balls into the ocean.
“But not that many golf balls are hit directly into the water,” says Mark Stilwell, Pebble Beach Company’s vice president. “There’s beach areas and coastal cliff areas where the balls are often hit.” And waves, rainfall and gravity transport these errant golf balls into the ocean.
Between 2016 and 2018, Alexandra Weber, a freediver and student at Cabrillo College, and her friends removed nearly 30,000 golf balls from the Stillwater Cove region. “Golf balls have never been studied or even recognized being in the ocean before,” said Weber, who attended Carmel High School. “It was heartbreaking when I first came across them,” she said, “because the environment we have here in the Monterey Bay Marine National Sanctuary is so precious and preserved.”
She estimates that between 1 to 5 million golf balls have been lost to the environment since 1919, when Pebble Beach Golf Links began operation. Her research recently published in the journal of Marine Pollution Bulletin points out that these underwater golf balls wear out, contribute microplastics, and leach chemical pollutants into the ocean. These pollutants can get absorbed into marine life, and eventually reach us.
Recognizing the seriousness of the problem, the Pebble Beach Co. has made a five-year commitment to undertake a series of organized golf ball cleanups. They will be sponsoring nearly 200 annual dives to 11 intertidal and subtidal sites around Pebble Beach, where golf balls have been known to accumulate.
Fate of golf balls underwater
Underwater, golf balls are barely negatively buoyant. They sink to the ocean floor and get moved around even by the lightest wave currents.
But the strength and direction of these currents dictate where golf balls will aggregate. At these aggregation hotspots, golf balls have a rock tumbling experience. “Golf balls are being tossed into rocks and thrown all around across the sea floor,” Weber said.“It’s right in the surf zone where the water is constantly pounding.”
It’s no surprise that these golf balls wear out over time. Over the course of two years, Weber collected golf balls that were at varying stages of degradation. Some had lost their glossy polyurethane coating, which gives these dimpled balls their glossy look. Others had lost their white paint and appeared chalky. Some even lost their characteristic dimples and had smooth surfaces.
In this process of degradation, toxic chemicals from the paint and glossy coating leach into the water. At the same time, tiny particles of corroding plastic are also released into the ocean. These get absorbed into the tissues of fish and other marine life, and enter the food chain.“It eventually reaches us, “ Weber says, “which is the scary thing.”
She has also found golf balls that may be more than 15 years old. She’s certain because these balls with broken outer shells revealed a 275-yard stretched rubber thread wound around a rubber core. These wound golf balls were popular in the last century, but had begun to be phased out in the late 1990s.
These threads are buoyant, float on the ocean surface, and get tangled in kelp. “That presents opportunities for different marine species to be ingesting it a lot more easily,” Webber said.
Armed with National Sanctuary advice, Pebble Beach Co. steps in
As part of every collection dive, Weber and her friends picked up 500 to 5,000 golf balls on a daily account.
“The number of golf balls that the kids were collecting routinely brought the issue to our attention,” said Paul Michel, superintendent for Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.
Between 2016 and 2017, the Marine National Sanctuary conducted surveys near Pebble Beach to confirm the magnitude of golf balls deposited underwater. “We saw several hundred, if not several thousand, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Michel said.
Through these surveys his team identified 11 golf ball aggregation sites in the intertidal and subtidal regions. These hotspot areas – near the 18th, 17th, eighth and sixth holes at Pebble Beach Golf Links — are small and should be the focus of future cleanup efforts, according to Michel.
Over the last two years, the Pebble Beach Co. has been conducting weekly shoreline cleanups. But these remove very few golf balls in comparison to how many there are underwater. Now, that’s about to change.
They are committed to sponsoring 198 annual dives for the next five years, to recover golf balls from the 11 sites. These dives will be on top of ongoing shoreline beach cleanups and will cost Pebble Beach Co. $200,000-$250,000 over the five-year period.“Taking care of the unintentional golf balls that find their way into the ocean is part of our environmental ethic,” Stilwell said. “We want to do the right thing.”
The company’s goal is to remove golf balls that have accumulated over years, and continue to collect any new additions. They hope to ultimately reduce the number of balls going into the ocean by creating awareness among golfers.
“Hitting a bad shot is part of the nature of the game, but no one should feel comfortable intentionally hitting a golf ball into the ocean,” Stilwell said. “We remind people in a firm but polite way that they should be respectful.”
Fate of the recovered golf balls
Weber is excited to see a more organized effort dealing with the golf balls issue. “I think this is our first big step toward making a difference,” she says. “I think it can be looked upon as a model for other golf courses to replicate.”
But what happens to the golf balls once they’re recovered from the ocean? Some people reuse or resell the ones that haven’t suffered much deterioration. But Weber is collaborating with a local artist, Ethan Estess, to use the golf balls she has collected, and is turning them into an interactive art sculpture.
Some 20,000 golf balls will be used to create a representation of a barrelling wave. “People can literally climb into the wave, stand on the surfboard, and feel what it’s like to be barreled in a wave of trash,” Weber said. “It’s kind of a demonstration for how we need to stop plastics from entering our oceans before it becomes a wave of trash.”
They plan to mount this evocative artwork on a flatbed trailer and haul it across the country. Their goal is to educate people who may not be aware of the problems of marine pollution yet.