New balls…er…bottles please at Wimbledon

With the Wimbledon Tennis championships starting today it is officially the time to get the strawberries and cream out of the fridge and enjoy some championship tennis, but there will be something different about Wimbledon this year. It will be a subtle thing that many spectators and viewers on the telly won’t even notice, but it is something that environmentalists have been clamouring for and in 2023 it has happened.

SW19 will be doing away with single use Evian water bottles that players have used to hydrate themselves as they battle to gain points over rivals. Instead the players will have new reusable 750ml Evian bottles instead. But as the new bottles take 30 seconds to fill, the players who have just minutes to rest will probably have to rely on ball boys and girls to refill the bottles for them.

The move comes as eco-campaigners have in recent years charged Wimbledon with displaying a bad image around the world with the use of single use plastic bottles. Hattie Park, Wimbledon’s head of sustainability told the press: “This year, it’s the players who we hope will be role models for Wimbledon’s reuse culture’.