Turning Waste Into Opportunity

Dillon Rosenthal is giving broken pickleballs a second life

By Carl Foster
October 7, 2026 • 12 min read

Dillon Rosenthal is the Founder and CEO of BounceBack Pickle, an award-winning startup building the first closed-loop recycling system for pickleball. BounceBack collects cracked and damaged pickleballs from facilities across the country, processes the material, and turns it back into new, high-performance pickleballs.

Since launching the company in 2025, Dillon has grown BounceBack from a local pilot in Southwest Florida into a nationwide recycling network spanning nearly 100 facilities across more than a dozen states. The company has diverted thousands of pounds of pickleball plastic from landfills and gained recognition on both national and global stages, including being named a 2026 Hult Prize Global Finalist.

Now, BounceBack is entering its next phase of growth, continuing to scale its recycling network nationwide and launching its first recycled pickleball following multiple rounds of prototyping and rigorous product testing.

Dillon is a graduate of Florida Gulf Coast University’s School of Entrepreneurship, where he was recognized as the Undergraduate Student of the Year. He has spent much of his life building businesses and is passionate about entrepreneurship, sustainability, and helping shape the future of one of the world’s fastest-growing sports.

I had a chance to get a sneak preview of how the next generation, led by Dillon, is focused on helping keep our environment clean and safe for years to come by recycling all those used plastic balls.

Finding Pickleball

CARL: Dillon, how and when did you discover pickleball?

DILLON: I personally discovered pickleball in college. I’m a recent graduate of Florida Gulf Coast University in Southwest Florida, which I like to call the pickleball capital of the world.

During my freshman year in 2022, one of my friends invited a group of us to go play at a local park. At the time, he was really getting into pickleball, and honestly, we all kind of made fun of him for it because it was still very much seen as an “older person’s sport.”

Four of us went out that first time, and we had an absolute blast. We went back and told a few more friends about it, and within a couple of weeks we had groups of 10–15 people going out to the courts multiple times a week. We couldn’t get enough of it.

Over time, some people naturally stopped playing as often, but there was a core group of us that continued playing consistently throughout college. For the next three and a half to four years, it became this great side hobby that got us out of the house, helped us destress from coursework, brought us closer together, and gave us something competitive and fun to do.

A few of my friends eventually took it further and started playing in local and even national competitions. I went in a slightly different direction. As an entrepreneurship student, I started looking at this massively growing sport and asking where the problems were. One of the biggest ones I kept seeing was the amount of waste being created by broken pickleballs.

That eventually became BounceBack.

Discovering the Problem

CARL: When did you feel and see a need to look at recycling pickleballs, and what were the early challenges for you?

DILLON: The idea didn’t happen overnight.

We started playing in 2022, but it wasn’t until early 2025 that I really started putting the pieces together. As we got better at pickleball, we naturally became more particular about the balls we were playing with. Once a ball cracked, warped, or started playing poorly, we threw it away. I personally was probably throwing away at least one ball a week.

Then I started paying more attention.

For a period of a few months, almost every time I went to a pickleball facility or public court, I would look inside the trash cans. I was consistently seeing 20, 30, sometimes 50-plus pickleballs sitting in the trash, and those trash cans are being emptied at least weekly.

That was when I realized this was much bigger than just the balls my friends and I were throwing away.

I started researching what happened to broken pickleballs and found a handful of organizations doing what I would describe as general landfill diversion, collecting balls and sending them to recycling companies capable of processing that type of plastic. Pickleballs are typically made from a type of polyethylene that isn’t something you simply throw into your normal curbside recycling bin.

My immediate thought was: instead of just finding another use for the plastic, why don’t we turn old pickleballs back into new pickleballs?

That became the big question behind BounceBack: Can we take this waste stream and create a high-quality performance pickleball out of old pickleballs?

Building a Sustainable Solution

CARL: What has been the reception of your mission within the pickleball community as well as clubs and municipalities?

DILLON: The reception has been incredibly encouraging, and I think a big reason for that is because people already recognize that this is a problem.

Players see broken balls getting thrown away every week. Facility managers see trash cans full of them. Clubs are buying thousands of balls. Once you point the problem out, you almost can’t unsee it.

Today, we’re working with nearly 100 facilities across 14 states, and we’ve diverted more than 3,000 pounds of pickleball plastic from landfills.

One of the biggest things we’ve learned, though, is that sustainability alone isn’t enough. If you want clubs and facilities to participate at scale, you have to make the program incredibly easy, affordable, and valuable to them.

That thinking led us to build our Sustainable Facility Program. Instead of simply asking facilities to “save their broken balls for us,” we built a system around it. We provide the collection infrastructure, the recycling process, the shipping system, and marketing materials that allow a facility to show its members and community that it is actively participating in a sustainability initiative.

That “what’s in it for me?” component is important. A facility gets to reduce waste, but they also get something they can market to their membership and their community. We want sustainability to be something clubs are proud to participate in, not another operational headache for them.

Putting Performance to the Test

CARL: What’s been the feedback on the play of your recycled balls from the pros and amateur tournament players? Can you compare the playability to any of the hundreds of balls in the marketplace now?

DILLON: This was probably the biggest question we had as a company.

When our first prototypes came back, we knew that if the ball didn’t perform, we didn’t really have a business. Nobody is going to sacrifice performance simply because a product is more sustainable.

So rather than just testing the balls ourselves and saying they were great, we sent them out to head pros, facility managers, and experienced players across the country.

The feedback exceeded our expectations.

The most common comparison we received was to the Franklin X-40. Players told us the BB-1 had good flight, the right balance between being too hard and too soft, consistent bounce, and strong durability, which is obviously especially important when your entire mission is built around reducing waste.

We also asked testers to put the balls into games without telling other players which ball they were using. They were used in normal recreational play, competitive environments, and tournament-style games, and we consistently received feedback that players could not tell they were playing with a recycled ball.

We have written feedback from those tests as well, which was an enormous validation point for us.

And the exciting thing is that those were our prototypes.

Our first production batch has gone through a few additional tweaks and improvements since then.

Our goal is not to make the best recycled pickleball. We want to make one of the best pickleballs on the market, period.

CARL: What’s the biggest difference between your recycled balls and a new ball?

DILLON: From the player’s perspective, very little, and that is exactly the point.

We don’t want someone to pick up a BounceBack ball and think, “This is pretty good for a recycled ball.” We want them to play with it and forget that it is recycled at all.

The biggest visual difference you may occasionally notice is a very small speck of another color within the material. If orange, pink, blue, or different shades of yellow balls entered the recycling stream, a tiny speck of that plastic can sometimes remain visible in the finished ball.

Personally, I think that actually tells part of the story of the product.

But from a performance standpoint, flight, bounce, brightness, feel, and durability, our objective is for there to be no noticeable compromise.

The biggest difference is really what happened before that ball reached the court. Instead of relying entirely on newly manufactured material, we are taking plastic that was headed toward a landfill and putting it back into play.

Creating a Nationwide Network

CARL: How are you collecting used balls from facilities, clubs and parks around the country? What kind of support are you looking for to get containers into facilities and then get the balls back to your facility?

DILLON: This is where we realized very early that we weren’t just building a pickleball company. We were building a reverse supply chain.

Collecting balls from one local park is easy. Collecting them efficiently from facilities all over the United States is much harder.

That challenge is what led us to build our Sustainable Facility Program.

Participating facilities receive a collection system for their broken balls and a simple process for getting those balls back into our recycling network. We’ve worked hard to make the logistics as convenient as possible because facility managers already have enough to worry about. The last thing we want is for recycling pickleballs to become another complicated task on their list.

We’re now at 98 partner facilities across 14 states, and the support we’re looking for is really straightforward: we want clubs, resorts, private facilities, municipalities, tournament operators, and other pickleball organizations to stop throwing their broken balls away and give us an opportunity to keep that material in the sport.

For facilities, there’s also a business benefit. They get to demonstrate a measurable sustainability initiative to members, players, sponsors, and their local community.

The more facilities that participate, the stronger the collection network becomes, and ultimately the more efficient the entire recycling process becomes.

Funding the Vision

CARL: You’ve made several presentations for your new business idea and concept and even competed for some large prizes with some success. What have you learned from that process in your efforts to raise more funding?

DILLON: Pitch competitions have played a massive role in building BounceBack.

We’ve now raised nearly $100,000 through pitch competitions and other non-dilutive opportunities without giving away equity in the company.

I’ve had the opportunity to pitch BounceBack on stages everywhere from London and Los Angeles to Minnesota, Texas, and throughout Florida.

Obviously, the funding has been incredibly helpful. For an early-stage company, being able to fund prototyping, manufacturing, recycling infrastructure, logistics, and growth without immediately giving away ownership is extremely valuable.

But I think the learning has been just as valuable as the money.

Every time you pitch, somebody asks a question you haven’t thought about. Every judge, investor, entrepreneur, or industry expert looks at the business from a slightly different perspective. After you hear the same question or objection five or ten times, you realize there is probably something in your business that needs to be clarified or improved.

Pitching has also taught me how important simplicity is. As founders, we know every little detail about our companies, and sometimes we want to explain all of it. But the best businesses should be understandable very quickly.

For us, that became very simple: we take broken pickleballs and turn them back into new pickleballs.

The competitions have helped us refine that story while giving us the capital to keep proving it.

CARL: Your goal of helping eliminate waste from pickleballs sent to landfills is admirable, and you’ve already recycled over 10,000 balls. Are you working with any major pickleball companies on your mission to collaborate in this effort for a cleaner environment?

DILLON: We’ve actually moved beyond measuring our impact simply by the number of balls collected because the scale has grown pretty quickly. Today, we’ve diverted more than 3,000 pounds of pickleball plastic from landfills through our network.

We currently work with the Re-Pickle Project and CourtReserve, and we’re also having conversations with several larger organizations across the pickleball industry.

There are some partnerships and conversations that I unfortunately can’t announce publicly yet, including discussions with larger paddle manufacturers and other companies in the space.

We’ve also seen interest from resorts, cruise lines, clubs, and other organizations that want to incorporate recycled and custom-branded pickleballs into what they’re doing.

For us, the bigger vision is to become the recycling infrastructure for this category.

The entrepreneurial side of me is very competitive. We don’t want to simply participate in the recycled pickleball market. We want BounceBack to define it.

If pickleball continues growing at the rate it is today, the amount of material entering the waste stream is only going to increase. We believe there is an opportunity to build the system that keeps that material circulating within the sport rather than continually manufacturing, using, and throwing it away.

Taking the Mission Global

CARL: You will be speaking at our upcoming World Pickleball Conference in October as a new business. What is your message to the pickleball business community on ways to support your mission? Are you also looking at the global business community exploding in Asia, Australia, China, Canada and Europe, and how will you tackle that?

DILLON: My biggest message to the pickleball business community is that sustainability does not have to come at the expense of business.

In fact, I think the most scalable sustainability solutions are the ones where everybody involved gets something out of participating.

Facilities can reduce waste while showing their members and communities that they are taking real action. Brands can align themselves with a positive environmental initiative. Players can continue using a high-performance product without sacrificing the experience they expect on the court.

And for BounceBack, the larger the network becomes, the more efficiently we can collect material and put it back into circulation.

From an international standpoint, we’re absolutely thinking globally.

Through social media alone, we’ve been able to connect with players, clubs, pro shops, and businesses throughout Canada, Australia, Southeast Asia, and other international markets. We’re currently in conversations with companies in Australia as well.

Our approach, however, is to build this responsibly.

We want to conquer the U.S. market first, continue strengthening our collection network, and resolve some of the remaining supply-chain inefficiencies before trying to be everywhere at once.

Those improvements are important for two reasons: they lower our cost of goods, and they also improve the environmental impact of the product.

Based on our current analysis, we estimate that recycling and remanufacturing our balls results in approximately 28% lower CO2 emissions per ball compared with manufacturing an entirely new ball. As we continue improving the supply chain, we believe there is room to improve that further.

Once we have the model running exactly how we want it in the U.S., the long-term opportunity to replicate it internationally is enormous.

What Comes Next

CARL: Are you looking at other pickleball products for recycling like shoes, paddles, etc., or are balls your main focus for the next few years as the sport continues to grow worldwide?

DILLON: Right now, balls are absolutely our focus.

There are a couple of sustainability problems within pickleball and sports more broadly, but I personally believe that when you focus intensely on solving one problem, you have a much better chance of making a meaningful impact.

We want to crack the code and, as I said, conquer pickleball recycling first.

That means building the collection infrastructure, perfecting the material processing, scaling manufacturing, growing nationally, and eventually bringing that system into international markets.

Once we have done that successfully, I think there are some really interesting opportunities to look at other products within pickleball and even other sports.

But I don’t want BounceBack trying to recycle balls, paddles, shoes, nets, and ten other products before we have completely solved the first problem.

There are millions of pickleballs being thrown away, and that is the problem we wake up focused on every day.

If we can prove that a closed-loop system works at scale for pickleball, I think it could become a blueprint for what circularity looks like across sports. ●

Dillon will take the stage Saturday, October 17, at the 5th Annual CourtReserve World Pickleball Conference at the Palm Beach Convention Center to share the BounceBack mission with the pickleball business community and club owners.

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About Carl Foster
Carl Foster is the Chairman of the World Pickleball Conference and the CEO of Foster Events Group, LLC, where he specializes in the production and management of high-profile sports and entertainment events. With over 50 years of experience in broadcasting, fundraising, and event leadership, he produces Inside WORLD Pickleball and serves as a lead moderator for industry summits. He is a central figure in the professionalization of pickleball, connecting technology experts, organizational leadership, and the player community to elevate the sport’s presence on a global scale.

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