Westport, Connecticut Synthetic Turf Fields: Safe or Sorry?
Saugatuck Elementary School, in Westport, Connecticut has a terrific looking 2 year old artificial turf playing field. It's composition includes recycled rubber tire particles, formed into small pellets which lie between the plastic grass strands. My kids love it! It doesn't get muddy, so they can play football in the rain at recess, and it is always soft, never dried out from the late summer sun. Further, those excrement making machines, our band of merry Canada geese, stay off it. Those pellets do come home in sneakers and clothing, but are easily shaken off or washed out.
However, while it needs no pesticides or other chemicals to stay green all year long, the make-up of this synthetic turf field may, some claim, be harmful in other ways. The risk that children playing on these types of fields might be injured, or exposed to harmful chemicals from the pellets, is the subject of many local, and national, opinions, both for and against the continued use of artificial turf instead of natural grass.
Connecticut is using money from a prior environmental contamination settlement to determine if the ground-up tires is the equivalent of a defective product when it is used for fields or in gardens as mulch. While I am not aware of any fields having been closed during this investigation, apparently, no new fields will be approved until the safety issue is resolved.
What I don't see in any of the articles focusing on the safety of artificial turf fields is a comparison to the relative harms our children are exposed to when natural grass is used. For instance, when Saugatuck Elementary School's field surface was natural grass, the amount of goose excrement on it was overwhelming. Youth football was, and is, regularly played on that field. Cuts, scrapes and areas of childrens' bodies such as mouths and noses must routinely have come in contact with that fouled ground. The query then is whether exposure to goose excrement is worse than exposure to these artificial materials. We should all encourage our legislators and local governments to ask that this additional inquiry as to relative safety also be made. To find your local representatives, click Here
If your child becomes ill or is seriously injured while playing on any school field, prompt medical attention and a report of the problem to the school will aid in developing answers to these safety concerns.
