All this talk about going green, a big part of saving the
environment is to avoid creating more waste that will just end up clogging
our land fills. Before you replace your hot tub cover think about this, there are 10 million
spa owners in the USA, if each one of them uses a typical rigid foam
spa cover on their hot tub how much waste are they creating?
Let’s figure that each
foam hot tub 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 article we will use
10.5 cubic feet per cover even though the industry has gone to thicker foam, tapered foam which would add a lot to these calculations.
If each cover on every hot tub becomes saturated or broken within two years and
needs to be replaced that would mean that we would be adding 52.5
million cubic feet of waste to our landfills in just spa covers every
year.
If it takes two and a half Hot Tub 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 hot tub covers.
If there are 11 million Cubic yards of stone in the Great Pyramid at
Giza, we are adding enough foam to build a duplicate of it to our
landfills just from used hot tub covers every six years conservatively.
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 hot tub
covers from Seattle Washington to Miami Florida every two years.
In case you have not noticed most foam filled Hot Tub 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.
Don’t worry about burying the planet in pavement, in a few years we could bury the entire
planet with foam just from saturated foam hot tub covers from the USA
alone.
So what is the solution? Well 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 hot tub
cover is the foam, 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 Covers don’t use rigid foam they 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.