Mission
The Second Serve Project is a small, deliberate intervention against everyday waste. It is also, quietly, a love letter to the engineering habit of just doing the next useful thing.
Tennis balls die slowly, and almost entirely out of sight.
Roughly 325 million tennis balls are produced every year. Most live a few hours of play and then sit in a landfill for 400+ years. They're rubber, nylon, and felt: recyclable in theory, ignored in practice.
Country clubs, academies, schools, casual courts. The waste is everywhere, and it's polite. Nobody is mad about it. That's exactly why nothing changes.
Tennis balls are not the climate crisis.
Diverting them will not move a glacier. We know.
But small, well-designed things stack. Each colorful bin is a quiet argument that waste isn't inevitable, and that someone, somewhere, can just decide to do something about it. That's the entire posture. Colorful, stubborn, specific.
See a problem. Sketch a fix. Ship the ugly version.
Behind every bin is the same instinct civil engineers train into themselves: notice a problem in the real world, sketch a solution, prototype it badly, refine it, put it out where people can use it. Then look around for the next thing.
That's the secondary mission of this project, honestly. Earthquake-proof homes, bikeable streets, recyclable courts, colorful trash cans — they all come from the same habit. The goal isn't to fix everything. It's to fix the next thing in front of you and keep that habit running.
The bins are the beginning.
Pickup partnerships with the first clubs and academies in San José. Sorting by life-stage: still-playable, practice-only, end-of-life. Pilot reuse with dog parks, school PE programs, and a small experiment with shredded-felt court resurfacing.
We're prototyping in public. Come along.
Tennis balls won't save the world.
But the habit of trying might.