Hot Tub Covers and the Environment?

There's lots of talk these days about sustainable development. For product manufacturers this means creating products that won't be piling up in land fills and needing to be replaced. There are approximately 10 million hot tub owners in the USA, and most of them currently uses a typical rigid foam Hot Tub Covers on their hot tub. For the sake of this explanation each foam cover is only two inches thick and every spa is eight feet by eight feet. That would mean each hot tub 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.

Each foam cover on average becomes saturated within two years and needs to be replaced; this causes approximately 52.5 million cubic feet of waste to be added our landfills in just hot tub covers every year.
If it takes two and a half covers worth of foam to make up one cubic yard that translates to four million cubic yards of waste added to our land fills every two years just in hot tub covers.

There are 11 million Cubic yards of stone in the Great Pyramid at Giza. We are adding enough foam to our landfills just from used spa covers every six years to build a second Great Pyramid. There are four and a half million cubic yards of concrete in Hoover Dam. We could build a two lane highway of discarded foam filled spa covers from Seattle Washington to Miami Florida every two years.

In case you haven't shopped for a new hot tub cover in a while, covers are not two inches thick anymore. If all those old foam covers were four inches thick all these calculations could be doubled.
But we are being conservative so we'll pretend covers are just 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, look out Great Wall of China!

Forget about parking lots, in our lifetime we could pave the entire planet with foam just from saturated hot tub covers from the United States alone.

What's one simple step spa owners can take for a more sustainable future? 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 the planet. You just need to get a Hot Tub Cover that does not use foam to insulate. There would be two major advantages to doing so. First the hot tub cover that did not use rigid foam to insulate would last longer. Since what always fails in the typical hot tub covers is the foam filling, either breaking or getting so saturated that you cannot lift it, a hot tub 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 much more friendly to the environment when it does come time to discard it. Equaling less trash, less waste, and less land fill. Now that is what developing a more sustainable future is all about.