Your lost golf balls will be here long after you're gone

As CNN reports, researchers at the Danish Golf Union have determined that it takes between 100 and 1,000 years for a golf ball to decompose naturally. That's bad enough in and of itself, but consider the fact that an estimated 300 million balls are lost each year -- I'm responsible for about a third of that total -- and you can see that we're talking about some serious waste.

The scope of the problem became apparent recently when researchers diving to the depths of Loch Ness -- looking for evidence of the monster, of course -- were stunned to find "hundreds of thousands" of golf balls littering the sea floor. Zero monsters, untold numbers of Titleists.

Remember the old urban legend about golf balls having radioactive cores? Turns out that wasn't quite so farfetched. The Danish researchers found that golf balls release high quantities of heavy metals when they dissolve, and zinc in the core infiltrates surrounding sediment and wildlife.

It's not like this is a new problem. The poet T.S. Eliot once said that the only relics of Western civilization that would endure would be "the asphalt road and a thousand lost golf balls." (To be fair, he was writing before Keith Richards was born.) It looks like he was off target only in terms of quantity. 

A United Kingdom government official, Patrick Harvie, characterized the problem this way: "From the moon to the bottom of Loch Ness, golf balls are humanity's signature litter in the most inaccessible locations." I'm sure Loch Ness qualifies as a water hazard, but the moon? That's got to be out of bounds, right?

The solution to this growing problem is simple: we need to switch all our tournaments to putt-putt, effective immediately. Nobody ever loses balls there.