Going Green With Better Spa Covers

Going Green? Yeah, it’s the question on everyone’s lips it seems.  Americans like other countries citizens are becoming more aware of their routine wasteful habits.  When you go to the grocery store, do you bring reusable grocery bags?  Are you beginning to use household products that are safer on the environment, less harmful chemicals and more friendly chemicals, ones that still work hard on your tough stains but aren’t going to harm any of Earth’s most beloved creatures?  We think now about what we are doing in terms of being green instead of mindless wandering towards potential dangerous products and wasteful behavior.  

Hear me out for a minute, to illustrate the waste and excess caused by rigid foam covers.  There are 10 million spa owners in the United States roughly at one time.  Each one of them has had or still has a foam cover.  For the sake of this demonstration each foam cover will only be two inches thick and every spa is only 96”Sq (standard eight by eight feet).  And with that size, the spa covers would contain 10,666 cubic feet of foam per spa cover.  For the rest of the example—we will use 10.5 cubic feet per cover.

For this example we are going to say that each foam cover lasts two years before becoming saturated with water or broken down and unusable.  If that were true, which for this example it is.  Than every year we would be adding 52.2 million cubic feet of waste to the landfills of the United States—in used foam covers alone.  If it takes the foam from two and half covers to make up one cubic yard, than that translates to 4 million cubic yards of waste that we are adding every two years.

There are 11 million cubic yards of stone in the Great Pyramids at Giza.  We are adding enough foam to build a duplicate model of the Great Pyramids to the landfills of the U.S just in foam spa covers every six years conservatively.  There are four and a half million cubic yards in the Hoover Dam.  With all of the foam filled spa covers we are discarding every two years we could build a two lane highway from Seattle, WA to Miami, FL.

If you have not noticed most foam filled spa covers are not two inches thick anymore. If all those old foam covers were four inches thick all these calculations would be double.  We are being conservative for sake of illustration.  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. Crazy to think about that waste.  On average according to recent surveys.  Each spa owner has owned at least 2 foam covers in the lifetime of their spa and at least a quarter of all who were surveyed have gone through three, and their spa is still in great condition.

In case you have not noticed most foam filled spa covers are not two inches thick anymore. 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.

Is there a solution to this waste problem? Yes there is, and t is fairly easy and simple to do.  Spend time shopping for a better spa cover. There are options available on the Internet that your local spa dealer does not offer; they are limited to the covers available to them. You do not have to quit using your spa to save the environment. 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 spa cover does not use rigid foam it will also be a lot friendlier 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.