Can Spa Covers Be Green ?

Hot Tub Covers saving the planet? Thinking about your habits more in terms of the environment lately?  It’s the catch phrase ably named “Going Green.”  It deals with every day routines and uses in terms of their damage to the environment.  So how do Spa Covers and HotTub Covers fit into the scheme? Well if styrofoam cups can stir up protests how much more harmful is is to use rigid foam board to cover your spa when you know that it is going to need to be replaced every couple years? Its all the little things we are doing to help leave less generational damage on the environment with our wasteful habits and harmful chemicals.  We also look for the biodegradable products or recyclable, so we can rest at ease—when we are done with whatever we are using, like a plastic iced coffee cup—it will be compostable, or broken down and reused again.  Products like those iced coffee cups are now made with corn, and other ingredients that can be broken down and leave no waste behind.

Follow me for a moment; here is an illustration to show the waste and excess caused by hard foam Hot Tub Covers.  Roughly, there are 10 million spa owners in the U.S today.  Each one of them has owned a foam cover, because they come with your spa.  For this demonstration we’ll say that each foam cover is two inches thick and each spa is eight feet by eight feet.  That would mean that each hot tub cover contains about 10,666 cubic feet of foam per spa cover.  And for the rest of this example we will use 10.5 cubic feet per Hot Tub Cover. 

In this example, we are going to say that each foam hot tub cover lasts for two years before it starts to become saturated with water and totally unusable.  So that means we are adding 52.2 million cubic feet of hot tub cover waste to our landfills every year.  If it takes only two and a half Hot Tub Covers worth of foam to make up one cubic yard.  That translates to 4 million yards of waste that we are adding to our landfills every two years just in used Spa Covers. 

In the Great Pyramids at Giza, there are 11 million Cubic yards of stone.  We are adding enough foam from hot tub covers, to build a duplicate of them to our landfills every six years conservatively. There are four and a half million cubic yards of concrete in Hoover Dam. With that we could build a two lane highway of discarded foam filled spa and hot tub covers from Seattle,WA to Miami,FL every two years.

Most foam filled spa covers are not two inches thick anymore. If all those old foam hot tub 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 hot tub 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.  Is their a solution?  Yes, you could shop for A Better Hot Tub Cover. There are options available on the internet that your local spa dealer probably does not offer. 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. There would be two major advantages to doing so. 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 Hot Tub Cover does not use rigid foam it will also be a lot friendlier to the environment when it does come time to discard it. There would be less trash, less waste, fewer landfills, not that is what going green is all about?