How Much Good Can A Green Clay Tennis Court Do?

Can you save the world by playing on green clay, staving off climate catastrophe? Probably not, but if all tennis courts in the world were made of green clay, we’d at least be better off, according to a new study in Applied Geochemistry. The paper, co-authored by Frankie Pavia and Jonathan Lambert, models the carbon emissions of different tennis court surfaces by accounting for the transportation of materials, construction, and maintenance. Compared to hard courts—the default setting for U.S. tennis—green clay courts produce 1.6 to 3 times lower carbon emissions in construction. Those green clay courts go on to offset emissions simply by continuing to exist. Because of how the clay material reacts with water and surrounding air, it removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere; over time, they can even go net-negative.

Pavia and Lambert didn’t set out to fuse their enthusiasm for Earth science and tennis courts, but that’s where they wound up. They met as graduate students at Columbia University, which is based in Manhattan’s Upper West Side and has its campus for Earth sciences across the river in the New Jersey Palisades, so the**** pair spent a lot of time shuttling back and forth. Eventually they realized that there was a tennis court at Riverbank State Park, where the bus dropped them off, so they convened a consistent doubles crew to play on their way back from work.

They did not yet know that the intersection of these two interests lay in rocks—very helpful rocks. Mitigating climate change will require humans to not just reduce their carbon emissions, but actively remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, using a suite of techniques collectively termed as carbon dioxide removal. One such technique is “enhanced rock weathering,” in which rocks with certain chemical makeup draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in a stable form for thousands of years.