Did you bother to look up the MARPOL V Treaty? Once again, plastic golf balls are banned because they are plastic (just like shopping bags or water bottles). There is no treaty exception for quantity. So there exists a niche market, which means funding and research will flow towards it. It is fairly simple economics. I realize that a lot of Redditors want to be iconoclasts and think they will blow everyone's mind with their radical thinking. That works when you actually have the information or theory to back up your opinion. In this case, you are just arguing against basic economics.

/u/SilverStar9192 did a good job of explaining the economics behind the research:

There a few reasons that I don't think the funders will have a problem:

• The research is essentially into biodegradable "plastic" replacements. There are tons of other applications that it could possibly apply to, once proven

• Golf balls are tricky to manufacture since they need to have a certain size, density, and elasticity (bounce), not to mention precision in the outer surface shape. So they allow you to work on multiple tricky aspects of the biodegradeable plastic project.

• The fact that it uses an object that is accessible and understandable to the average person makes the research interesting and attracts lay people to read about it. This attracts more interest to your university's programs and overall increases its profile - as evidenced by this exact article making it onto Reddit.

All of the above are good outcomes for a research project. Now, there could be other technical reasons that the research may or may not be useful, depending on what advancements were actually made - and I don't have the knowledge of the field to say for sure. But just to dismiss it out of hand because you feel golf is a game and not "important" enough, misses the entire point here.