Hit to the green by golfing with eco-friendly tees

Baseball has its horsehide, football has its pigskin and now golf is going “down on the farm” with tees made from corn.

More than 15 million Eco Tees were produced during the past 12 months in Starke County’s county seat, located in the middle of northwest Indiana’s cornbelt.

Eco Golf, a subsidiary of Hoosier Custom Plastics LLC, is under the same Knox Industrial Park roof as its parent company, co-owned by Gordon Schenk of Plymouth, Mike Tetzloff of Winamac and Craig Dulworth of Walkerton.

The biodegradable golf tees are manufactured using the traditional injection molding process where a pellatized material – in this case a corn starch mixture – is heated to liquid form and injected into a golf tee-shaped cavity in a tool.

The injection molding press produces up to 10,000 tees per hour, the tees rolling off a conveyor belt to be bagged or boxed and delivered literally worldwide.

“We’ve shipped 1.2 million Eco Tees to Disney resorts during the past year,” Gordon Schenk said. “They’re our biggest customer to date.”

Bulk pricing starts at 1.25 cents per tee and increases depending on color, custom imprinting, packaging and tee size.

Schenk and his partners acquired the Eco Tee technology from a Columbus entrepreneur in 2005 after starting production for him in Knox in 2004.

“In addition to being biodegradable, Eco Tees last longer than traditional wood tees,” Schenk said.