So, how many golf balls end up in the water every year?

Every time the Weber father and daughter duo went diving along Carmel Bay in California, they gathered between 500 and 5,000 golf balls. 

Carmel Bay in California (File photo)

Between May 2016 and June 2018, the Weber’s retrieved 50,000 golf balls in total, equaling around 2.5 tons of debris, equivalent to the weight of a pickup truck.

It is unclear how many golf balls are lost globally every year, but one estimate suggests the annual figure could be as high as three hundred million in the United States alone.

Lost Balls

In Thailand, golfers are used to cursing at those smiling Thai swimmers, who spend their time under water retrieving our new Titleist Pro V1 golf ball, we just sliced into the lake.

Thai swimmer(M. BRIDGE  photo)

Again, it is hard to be exact, but say pre Covid the 250 Thai courses each attracted an average of 250 golfers over a weekend. That is 62,500 rounds of golf just on Saturday’s and Sunday’s.

Assume that 35% or 21,875 of these players loose at least one ball in the water every weekend, then over a year that rises to a staggering 1,137,500 lost golf balls. And that does not take into consideration weekdays!

It is bad enough to lose a new ball, but many will end up back in our bags, when we go to buy some secondhand golf balls along the street.

Of course, these swimmers are laughing all the way to the bank, but at least they are keeping the golf course lakes free from pollution, which is a good thing.

Cheeky monkey

I wonder how many mobile phones get picked up too, even by wild animals

But with so many golf courses across the world with holes running alongside the sea or near a large lake, for example Hoanna Shores in Vietnam, Anvaya Cove GC in the Philippines, Sentosa’s lakes and coastline in Singapore, or the lakes at Angkor GC, it is mind boggling how many golf balls are polluting the lakes and oceans.

Even so, golf balls are a tiny percentage of the eight million tons of plastic human’s dump into the oceans every year. Some predictions suggest that there will be more plastic than fish in the sea by 2050.

So, how many golf balls do you lose a year in Cambodia?