Their playground? Golf courses. They crisscross the surroundings and especially the ponds to recover the lost balls. Hours of collections to then restore them and resell them. Baptiste, Elli and Jules created the Golfiller company a few months ago.
“In a golf course, if it is very busy, you can find up to 30,000 balls in the water”, explains Jules Paris, co-founder of Golfiller. In their twenties, Jules, a student and golf player for five years, and his two friends from high school, Elli Perrin and Baptiste Thel, both fully devoted to their new professional activity, set themselves a challenge: retrieve lost balls on golf courses. Equipped with diving suits, they cross the lakes. “For the moment, as we don’t have the diving bottles, we have to stay where we are on foot, we pick up gropingly,” Elli says.
After months, it was easy for them to distinguish pebbles from balls even in fairly complicated conditions, especially in winter, laughs Baptiste: “the record feeling is -4 degrees. In the water of a golf course lake, It’s dark, you can’t see anything.” “It’s not really diving, not fun”, for Jules. However, the three friends spend hours under water: “a session lasts between six and seven hours approximately. A small session in winter, as it is cold, it is between one and two hours”, specifies Baptiste. And inevitably, to pick up these balls, young entrepreneurs must make themselves known to golf directors. “It’s an exchange of good practice, we communicate to them for their golf, the courses need it because this sport is still not very widespread in France”, confides Jules.
“70% of the balls we recover are in good condition”
Once the bales have been harvested, they must be rehabilitated. “There are some that will have traces of mud but 70% of those that we recover are in good condition”, explains Baptiste who will soon start golfing with Elli. And for that, they have a process to follow. “We put them in a tank and we leave a product to degrease the ball. We rub them in a cement mixer where we have lined the bottom with synthetic to make a cleaning machine. And then they come out in good condition” , detail Baptiste and Jules.
A recycling system that is not very democratized in France yet. “There is a Quebec company that employs French people to do it, otherwise a few gardeners in certain golf courses take care of it”. But their work surprises some practitioners that the Lyonnais meet on the course admits Jules: “They ask us what we are doing, they are curious. They watch the balls we take out. Some players are reluctant, they tell us that “They’re no longer good. So we show them, they play with them and realize that it’s like a new ball.” And then they resell them on their Golfiller site, at less than 60% of the new price. Even used, these recovered bullets have “the same properties, the cells are not damaged.” And their buyers? “We have a bit of all levels, beginners, intermediates and professionals”, and Jules adds “we want to show ordinary players that even professionals can play with second-hand balls. There is no impact on their game.”
An ecological action
But their professional activity has above all an ecological aspect, insists Elli: “we come to clean up the bodies of water. The composition of a ball is really harmful for the ecosystem, for the fauna and flora. We are really committed on this point there. In a few months, we picked up about two tons of plastic.” Golf course lakes are bodies of water with no flow so all pollution stagnates. “We find bales gnawed by coypu or split. So the urethane that is inside will get into the ground. And around, there are fields so it’s bad for biodiversity, the eco system and people.” Close to the golf courses, the fauna is very varied and present. “Outdoor animals, wild boar, deer, come to drink in these lakes. They ingest plastic, urethane and titanium, so that has an impact”, relate Elli and Jules. Freshly launched, their business does not yet allow them to make a living from it. But Jules, Elli and Baptiste aim to quickly expand abroad.
