By Patricia Wood

It’s interesting to think about how many of our serious environmental problems are a direct result of thinking we can do better than nature. Virtually every time we try to improve on what the natural world has worked out over billions of years, we find that nature was actually smarter than we thought. Our modern solutions often don’t consider all the potential consequences, and as a result, we’ve got environmental problems that need solutions.

Take, for instance, grass. The lowly grass plant has evolved over billions of years to survive and thrive in a variety of settings, including the climate and soils of North America. It’s rugged – and given the right soil conditions, will out-compete most weeds. In California, where they cultivate dandelions as a food crop, they routinely spray pesticides to control grass.

Grass is soft, strong, resilient, and like most plants and trees, helps with carbon capture. But grass isn’t good enough for some people. They don’t like the fact that it’s not indestructible – that you can kill a grass plant by running or stomping on it after a heavy rain, especially on a sports field, where we demand full-time access and playability. Grass just isn’t making the cut.

Enter American business ingenuity. You want grass that can withstand almost any amount of abuse, that you play on even during a heavy rain event without damage? Well, the synthetic turf industry has the solution: plastic grass.

Of course, plastic isn’t soft like grass. So to cushion sports fields made from plastic grass, tons of used and ground-up tires – up to 40,000 on a typical field – are dumped into the plastic grass. Tires that were made with some pretty toxic chemicals, including known carcinogens arsenic, benzene, carbon black (which makes up to 40% of a tire), 1,3 butadiene, TCE, and cadmium, as well as neurotoxins, lead and mercury. These chemicals can volatilize into the air (you can smell the strong odor of rubber on a warm day) or run off fields with heavy rain and find their way into nearby water bodies, contaminating drinking water sources and harming aquatic animals and wildlife along the way.

To make the plastic grass, manufacturers need to use PFAS (per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances) to help the plastic go through the extruders more easily in the factory. PFAS is a family of over 6,000 different synthetic chemicals that are widely used in consumer products and industrial processes. Often referred to as “forever chemicals,” they are persistent, bio-accumulative (they build up in our bodies) and are highly toxic to humans and other living things. As with the tire chemicals, PFAS migrate readily through our environment, leaving their poison footprint everywhere they go.

The “good” news about plastic fields, used as a major selling point by the turf industry, is that we don’t have to use pesticides to control weeds (not that a properly maintained field needs pesticides, but hey, It sounds like a great environmental selling point!). On the other hand, there is no soil biology on a plastic field to take care of the various body fluids that are produced during sports play, tiny organisms quietly but consistently taking care of us without payment or notice. Without nature’s help, we need to use heavy duty chemicals to make sure the plastic fields don’t become hot beds of pathogens that can cause nasty diseases.

So, now we have a giant plastic field, tons of toxic crumb rubber, toxic chemicals leaching into the environment and the need for more toxic chemicals to do what nature usually does for us. What else is great about plastic fields?

Well, disposal is something the plastic field salesmen rarely talk about because the news is all bad. You can’t just take tons of plastic and ground up tires to the dump. For one thing, it’s really toxic. Most landfills won’t allow you to dump your old field there, so you need to transport the old field hundreds of miles to a place where environmental regulations are more lax – usually an economically depressed area with a minority population where local leaders have decided to trade the health and safety of nearby residents for the lucrative fees they can earn from allowing toxins to be dumped there.

All of this environmental nightmare is because we want to be able to play on our sports field even when there has been a heavy rain? We’re ready to accept all this toxicity and all this environmental degradation so our budding athletes can play on a “state of the art” plastic field?

I haven’t even mentioned the numerous injuries that can result from synthetic turf. Because of the unforgiving surface that occurs as the infill becomes packed down, concussions are more prevalent and excessive heat on hot days puts players at risk for second-degree burns on their feet as well as serious heat illnesses. Sports fans were startled when Odell Beckham Jr. pulled up short on a passing run in the last Super Bowl, having injured his ACL as his cleats got caught in the plastic grass. Most professional athletes don’t like plastic grass – they prefer the real thing.

And, of course, I haven’t even mentioned the astronomical, mind-bending cost of tearing up a grass field and replacing it with a plastic one. It’s in the many millions of dollars—money that could almost always be used for something that would benefit all kids, our communities and our environment.

But plain old grass just isn’t good enough. We think we have a better idea.