Ball pits, invented by designers Charlotte Rude and Hjördis Olsson-Une for Ikea in 1970, went on to become wildly popular. Fast food restaurants, amusement parks, play centers and community recreation facilities have all featured them.
To the wary parent, they seem like hotbeds of germs. Anecdotal stories (like these or these on Reddit, from people who worked at facilities with ball pits) of the slapdash way they’re cleaned—or not cleaned—don’t help the rumors:
– “A place I worked with a ball pit would just load up the balls in mesh bags and have one of the janitors drive through a car wash with the balls in the bed of their truck.”
– “I worked at this play place called Catch Air. We would clean the balls individually by hand every few weeks. Really shitty job.”
– “Sometimes little kids being little kids, there will be someone who’d poop or throw up in the ballpit. And a messy job too, its almost guaranteed you’ll get covered in it if you are the lucky one who goes in to fish out every ball.”
– “Babies will also chew and sneeze on everything, including the balls in the pit.”
– “When I worked at Chuck E Cheese we had a late night scheduled every six months to clean the ball pit. We would empty them all into bus tubs and run them thru the giant dishwasher. They smelled VERY strongly of urine, as I recall.”
– “Worked at McDonalds for years. The only time the ball pit got cleaned was when kids started coming out with poo on them.”
– “If you think they are nasty under normal circumstances, wait until they have about 12 years of dust sitting on them. The kind that gets sticky after awhile … Yeah it was as disgusting as you are picturing it.”
That said, ball pit cleaning machines do exist, and responsible facilities like TQ Playtopia in Oklahoma City use them regularly.
“Our amazing cleaning crew uses Tuesdays to deep clean the entire playground, and sanitize EVERYTHING,” the company writes. “Every ball from every pit gets run through our ball washer- that alone takes 5 hours!”
Here’s what the machines do: