Recycling

Recycling of the product has to do with how the product may be reused or remade after the product is disposed of or no longer being used. Many old, used Rawlings baseball gloves may be re-made or restored into new gloves (Berlow, “Baseball Glove). Old gloves can also be donated to be re-used by other people who can’t afford them as well. One such example of this is an organization based in Connecticut that collects old gloves that people don’t want anymore, and donates them to children in Cuba (Horgan, “Baseball for Cuban Kids”). By giving the gloves to kids instead of just throwing them out, it helps the environment, as the gloves are not thrown into some landfill somewhere, and it also helps give these kids an opportunity to play a game that they love when they otherwise may not have been able to. It is important to note that in this charity organization, they are not specifically targeting Rawlings baseball gloves, but any used baseball gloves in general to give to kids in Cuba. In the United States, Rawlings is by far the biggest baseball glove manufacturer and is the official baseball glove of Major League Baseball, but to kids in Cuba and other Caribbean countries, this is not the case. Meanwhile, a lot of these countries are major breeding grounds for professional baseball players. So even though Rawlings is the biggest manufacturer in the U.S., many baseball players in poorer countries do not care about the type of gloves they use, they just use whatever they can get. It only begins to make a difference for those of them who come to the U.S. to play professionally, where Rawlings is the official MLB glove.

At the same time, some of the leather from the gloves may be reused to make other products, such as leather wallets, handbags, and totes (DiCamillo, “Recycled Baseball Fashion: Owning a Piece of History”). While a lot of these recycled gloves are usually used by smaller businesses and collectors who buy old gloves to make the new products, there are bigger companies who do this as well, even ones as big as Coach and L.L. Bean (DiCamillo, “Recycled Baseball Fashion: Owning a Piece of History”). The re-used gloves and leather from the gloves are then sold back to customers, which is much better than the typical landfills that thrown out Rawlings gloves would normally be placed in. The recycling and re-using of the leather Rawlings gloves is actually extremely beneficial to the environment, as leather would otherwise take a full 50 years to decompose on its own (New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services. Time it Takes for Garbage to Decompose in the Environment). In addition for the regular 50 years it takes to decompose, the leather in the Rawlings gloves is tanned. By tanning leather, they use chemicals which actually help to keep leather from decomposing, which also can do significant damage to the environment in their pollution (Olsen “Can Leather Be Eco-Friendly…Ever?”). By recycling the leather, you are helping to keep these chemicals from doing more damage to the environment and reducing the pollution by not having to worry about the incredibly long amount of time it takes for leather to decompose.

Wallet made out of a recycled baseball glove

By Jonathan Borgese