All this talk about going green, a big part of saving the environment is to not create more waste that will just end up clogging our land fills. Follow me on this for a minute... There are 10 million spa owners in the USA, and each one of them uses a typical rigid foam spa cover on their hot tub. For the sake of this demonstration each foam cover is only two inches thick and every spa is eight feet by eight feet. That would mean each spa cover contained about 10.666 cubic feet of foam per spa cover. For the rest of this example we will use 10.5 cubic feet per cover.
If each of those two inch foam covers needed to be replaced every two years it would add 52.In spa covers alone that equals 5 million cubic feet of waste in our land fills every year. If it takes two and a half covers worth of foam to make up one cubic yard that translates to 4 million cubic yards of waste added to our land fills every two years just in spa covers.
It took 11 million cubic yards of stone to build the Great Pyramid of Giza, at this rate we could build a copy out of discarded foam spa covers every six years. There are four and a half million cubic yards of concrete in Hoover Dam. Every two years we would have enough discarded foam to build a two lane highway from Miami to Seattle every two years.
Most spa covers these days are not two inches thick. If all those old foam covers were four inches thick all these calculations would be double. But we are just being conservative so we want to stick with two inches thick. If we ripped the covers in half and laid those pieces end to end we could circle the earth at the equator on used spa covers every two years.
Heck with parking lots, in a few years we could pave the entire planet with foam just from saturated foam spa covers from the USA alone.
So what is the solution? You could start by choosing a better spa cover. Thanks to the internet you can now find other options you may not see at your local spa dealer. You do not have to quit using your spa to save us. You just need to get a Spa Cover that does not use foam to insulate. The advantages to this would be two fold. First the spa cover that did not use rigid foam to insulate would last longer. Since what always fails in the typical spa cover is the foam, either breaking or getting so saturated that you cannot lift it, a spa cover that did not use foam would tend to last longer.
Second, if the new type of spa cover does not use rigid foam it will also be a lot more friendly to the environment when it does come time to discard it. Less trash, less waste, less land fill, not that is what going green is all about.
