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Wilson Racket Sports Highlights Commitment to Environmental Responsibility With New Green Initiative

CHICAGO — Wilson Racquet Sports today announced the details of their new Green Initiative, a program committed to developing and implementing environmentally responsible products and manufacturing procedures across the racquet brand’s major product categories.

As the world’s leading racquet sports company, Wilson developed its Green Initiative as part of the company’s growing focus and global commitment to focusing more efforts towards environmentally considerate products. Wilson also hopes to encourage others within the tennis industry to follow suit in an effort to reduce overall waste and develop more environmentally friendly manufacturing processes.

“We felt a growing obligation to elevate our environmental focus and take some necessary steps to make a positive impact in several product areas,” said Jon Muir, GM of Wilson Racquet Sports. “We’ve been quietly working on implementing a number of important changes to our production and manufacturing processes over the past year, and we felt it was time to make both the industry and consumers aware of our Green Initiative. This will be a growing area of focus for our product development for 2008 and beyond.”

Many key elements of the Green Initiative have already been recently implemented into the packaging and manufacturing processes of current Wilson products. For tennis balls, all PET Wilson tennis ball cans now contain a minimum of at least 25% post consumer recycled PET. For 2007 alone, Wilson anticipates this will result in a reduction of 330,000 pounds of landfill waste.

For Wilson’s accessories and indoor racquet sports products, new changes in packaging and manufacturing processes are also being implemented. Wilson has already replaced the non-recyclable PVC packaging for their racquetball gloves with cardboard, a recyclable material. Additional packaging changes are being made to other indoor products such as protective eyewear for squash and racquetball that will reduce overall packaging waste. In addition, for Wilson’s Evolution Footwear line, Wilson is introducing new recyclable footwear inserts that will be standard in all Wilson tennis shoes starting in 2008.

As the clear #1 racket brand worldwide, another area where Wilson is making a significant change and adopting more environmentally friendly manufacturing processes is in tennis rackets – which has already started with the introduction of the new [K]Factor racket line this year. [K]Factor rackets are manufactured in a manner which reduces the amount of volatile solvents, when compared to normal methods of manufacturing. This same process will be implemented for all future [K]Factor rackets debuting in the new 2008 line next year.

Posted on August 13, 2007
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