Can your spa cover choice save the environment?

You may not think your next spa cover purchase is environmentally critical, but you should. Think of it this way… If there are over 10 million spa owners in the US alone and each of them uses a rigid foam cover on their spa, two inches thick, that would equate to about 10,666 cubic feet of foam per spa cover. . We’ll say 10.5 cubic feet per deck. If every cover on every spa becomes saturated within two years and needs to be replaced, that would mean 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 of foam to make up a cubic yard, that translates to 4 million cubic yards of waste added to our landfills every two years on spa covers alone. If there are 11 million cubic yards of stone in the Great Pyramid of Giza, we are adding enough foam to build a duplicate in our landfills with only 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 high, 1,244 feet wide, 660 feet thick at the bottom, and forty-five feet wide at the top. We could build a two-lane highway out 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 turn it into a four-lane highway. And we could do it every two years. But let’s be conservative and say two inches thick. If we were to rip covers in half and shave those pieces end to end, we could circle the earth at the equator with used spa covers every two years. Remember we are using two inch foam covers, if you use a four inch foam cover these numbers are doubled. To hell with parking lots, in a few short years we could pave the entire planet with foam just from foam-saturated spa decks from the US. In the immortal words of Robin the Boy Wonder, “Holy nightmare trash, Batman! ” Is there any hope out there? Well, yes, there actually is, and you don’t have to stop using your spa to save us. You just need to get yourself a SpaCap and tell every other spa owner you know to buy a SpaCap instead of a hard foam filled spa cover.

The SpaCap does a better job than any rigid foam cover and lasts years longer on average. But at the end of that long, useful life, disposing of an old SpaCap has considerably less impact on the environment. A typical SpaCap for an eight foot by eight foot spa can be compacted into one cubic foot of space. That’s a tenth of the size required for a foam cover. So if a SpaCap was in every spa in America and each SpaCap lasted seven years (we have some 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. It’s still significant, but it would take seventy-five years to make a stack as big as the Great Pyramid.

This does not address the environmental cost of transportation. If a good size trailer can haul 2000 cubic feet and you can fill every nook and cranny with a foam filled spa cover, the best you could get would be about 188 covers per trailer (Again these numbers are based on two inch foam If all spa owners in the United States use a conical cover, or a three-inch or four-inch cover, these numbers could easily double.) That means that transporting the aforementioned foam-filled covers would require about fifty-five thousand semi-trailers. Compare this to just five thousand to ship the same number of SpaCap spa covers. Imagine fifty thousand fewer truck trailers on the road. Talk about a savings in transportation cost. By the way, it would take the same number of truck trailers to transport those covers to dealers so you can buy the next one. That would be about 110,000 semi-trailers on the road vs. 10,000 total to transport the SpaCap to market and landfill. Of course, if SpaCap lasts longer, that would mean about 714 semi trailers per year compared to 55,000 trailers per year loaded with foam covers to cover the same number of spas. Imagine the fuel savings for those trucks.

So a Great Pyramid-sized stack of discarded foam covers every two years or a stack of the same-sized SpaCap spa covers in seventy-five years. 54,286 fewer semis on the road per year. Using a spa cover that requires a tenth of the energy to keep the spa water hot… Personally, I would prefer a SpaCap battery that big. I would take a photo in front of me.

I’ll only be about a hundred and twenty years old in seventy-five years, so I may need some spare parts by then. 10,000,000 spas using a tenth of the energy to keep the water hot. If it costs $50 per year (I want) to heat those 10,000,000 spas and the SpaCap 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 per year. Your actual savings may vary. To hell with Energy Star, the Department of Energy will probably want to give me a medal.