While it may look nice, the Mamaroneck River serves as a hazard for thousands of golfers. This image was captured at my local golf course, Maple Moor. The river cuts straight across a few holes, and has swallowed up countless golf balls of mine. The challenge of hitting over a river can be quite entertaining, but there’s certainly an unintentional environmental impact. Not everyone can be expected to master the game of golf and completely avoid the water (especially not at a public course), so perhaps more work should be done to make golf balls biodegradable.
I had never really thought about the environmental impact of golf balls on our rivers. Of course in most courses, the water hazards are man-made, or still lakes so it would not be much of a problem. However, you bring up an interesting point about working on making golf balls biodegradable, since I’m sure this river serves some other purpose elsewhere, and the golf balls may impact that.
I did some research about biodegradable golf balls and found there is a golf ball called the Ecobioball that has been sold on Amazon since around 2012. It is made of fish food and other natural materials. It takes a regular golf ball 100 to 1000 years to decompose, so that has to be terrible for the rivers.