From clay court to city street: the ACE'98 innovation

Every year in France, 14 million tennis balls end up as waste. Indispensable on the court, they are a genuine disaster for the planet: their lifespan is negligible (barely 30 to 60 minutes of play for professionals!) due to the rapid loss of their bounce. As a result, 97% of them are immediately incinerated or buried in landfill, where they will take nearly 400 years to decompose, releasing microplastics and methane.

Faced with this ecological nonsense, we decided to transform this short-lived by-product into a lasting product. In collaboration with several tennis clubs in the Vizela region of Portugal, located just a few kilometres from our workshops, we set up a short-circuit collection scheme.

The collected used balls are meticulously ground into very fine particles. This new powder is then fused with recycled synthetic rubber, tinted and injected directly into the mould to form the thick sole and the logo of the ACE'98.

Giving a desirable second life to an object destined for destruction — that is the very essence of the ACE'98. Past shapes the futur.