You may not think of your next spa cover purchase as critical to the environment, but you should.

Think of it this way... If there are over 10 million spa owners in the USA alone and each one of them uses a rigid foam spa cover on their spa, two inches thick that would equal about 10.666 cubic feet of foam per spa cover. We'll say 10.5 cubic feet per cover. If each cover on every spa becomes saturated 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 there are two and a half 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 spa 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 spa covers every six years conservatively. There are four and a half million cubic yards of concrete in Hoover Dam. Imagine the Hoover Dam, 726 feet tall, 1,244 feet wide, 660 feet thick at the base and forty five feet wide at the top. We could build a two lane highway of discarded foam filled spa covers from Seattle Washington to Miami Florida every two years. If all those old foam covers were four inches thick we could make it a four lane highway. And we could do it every couple years. But let's be conservative and say two inches thick. If we ripped the 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. Remember we are using two inch foam covers, if you use a four inch foam cover these numbers double. Heck with parking lots, in a few years we could pave the entire planet with foam just from saturated foam spa covers from the USA alone. In the immortal words of Robin the Boy Wonder, "Holy garbage nightmares, Batman!" Is there any hope out there?

Well yes there is actually, and you don't have to quit using your spa to save us. You just need to get an air filled spa cover and tell every other spa owner you know to buy one instead of a rigid foam filled spa cover. The air filled spa cover does a better job than any rigid foam cover and it lasts years longer on average. But at the end of that long and useful life, discarding of an old air filled spa cover is considerably less impact on the environment. A typical air filled spa cover for an eight foot by eight foot spa can be compacted into one cubic foot of space. That's one tenth the size required for a foam cover. So then if an air filled cover were on every spa in America and it lasted seven years (some out there that are still in use after ten) we would be creating one point four million cubic feet of waste per year. That's about fifty three thousand cubic yards per year. Still significant but it would take seventy five years to make a pile as big as the Great Pyramid.

This doesn't address the environmental cost of transportation. If a good size semi truck trailer can haul 2000 cubic feet and you could stuff every nook and cranny with a foam filled spa cover the best you could get would be about 188 covers per semi trailer (Again, these numbers are based on two inch foam. If every spa owner in America is using a tapered cover, or a three or four inch cover these figures could easily double). That means transporting the before mentioned foam filled covers would take around fifty five thousand semi truck trailers. Compare this to a mere five thousand to haul the same amount of inflatable spa covers. Imagine fifty thousand fewer truck trailers on the road. Talk about a savings in transportation cost. Incidentally that same number of truck trailers would be needed to haul those covers to dealers so you could by your next one. That would be about one hundred ten thousand semi trailers on the road verses ten thousand total to haul the inflatable spa cover to market and land fill. Of course if the air cover lasts longer that would mean about 714 semi truck trailers per year compared to 55,000 loaded trailers per year of foam covers to cover the same number of spas. Imagine the savings in fuel for those trucks.

So a stack of wasted foam covers as large as the Great Pyramid every two years or a pile of inflatable spa covers the same size in seventy five years. 54,286 fewer semi truck trailers on the road per year. Using a spa cover that requires one tenth the energy to keep the spa water warm... Personally I would prefer air cover pile that big. I'd have my picture taken in front of it. I'll only be in my mid one hundred twenties in seventy five years so I may require a few replacement parts myself by then. 10,000,000 spas using one tenth the energy to keep the water warm. If it cost $50 per year (I wish) to heat those 10,000,000 spas and the air filled cover saved 90 percent of that by being ten times better than a foam filled cover that would be an energy savings of 450,000,000 dollars per year. Your actual saving may vary.