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Author Topic: So.... what to do with all the recently banned bowling balls? A silly idea.  (Read 3138 times)

anorexicwonder

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I'm imagining at least several thousand of them out there right now.  I'd like to gather them up, send them to the Ukraine in hopes that their military may use them as cannonballs or drop them from a bomber on the invading Russian forces.    (I'd be completely freaked out if bowling balls started raining down on my head!)

I'm also picturing Osku Palermaa dressed as Rambo, hurling those bowling balls at enemy soldiers, inflicting serious damage.   Hell, with Osku's speed & a well placed throw he could take out many ground based vehicles & personnel.

Use your imagination folks!  Have a little fun this this.

 

Bowler19525

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Too funny.  I have joked for years that during a war the US should drop garbage on enemy forces as a way to clear our landfills.  Load all of the trash in to planes and just drop it on the enemy battlefields.  I mean everything.  Scrapped cars, appliances, tires, residential waste, everything.

With regards to the bowling balls, it is surprising that the ball manufacturers do not have a way to pulverize bowling balls in to dust.  Even if they are not recyclable, at the very least it would make their footprint a little more manageable for disposal.  It would be interesting if the companies could come up with a way to do that, and then offer a $5-$10 rebate to bowlers who trade their old ball in for a new one from the same brand.  Then the old ones get returned and pulverized.

milorafferty

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I say mail them all to Chad Murphy's home address.  :o

This is a real opportunity for the right person. We have all these petroleum based products that are currently either not recyclable or it's not profitable to do so. If I was a chemical engineer, I think this would be an area of interest for me.
"If guns kill people, do pencils misspell words?"

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JessN16

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I saw a story a month or two ago that addressed this issue (bowling ball disposal/recycling) directly and basically they aren't recyclable due to the differing types of materials used in construction (cover, core, filler, etc.).

Also, destruction/reclamation was net energy-positive, meaning the calculations of cost versus whatever metrics are used to score how much the balls "cost" you to dispose of in a landfill was tilted clearly toward outright disposal, not reuse.

I have a friend that was a PSO for years and just on a lark, decided to recover the core out of an old ball to display it and the amount of time, energy (and electricity, I'm sure) that it took to get the core out of the ball and into a displayable condition was significant. And he still didn't have a completely clean core at the end.

Strider

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I've done that a few times.  Even with a substantial crack around the entire ball, it still takes some effort to just spilt the ball in two.  I used a hammer and chisel to free and clean up the core from there, but like you said, it takes a while, and it's still not completely pure.

I had a ball with a wide crack around the whole ball.  I took it to work and dropped it to the ground (cement) from the 4th floor.  It "bounced" much further than I was expecting, and it still didn't break the ball in half.  I think it took 3 times to actually break the ball, and it was more like a third came off the ball.