Why We Don’t Recommend Artificial Grass for Most People

Sports stadiums were also the focus of some of the most alarming research about the future of synthetic turf as it relates to the environment and sustainability. In several European countries, where synthetic football pitches installed in the mid-2000s have reached the end of their lifespan, studies looking into the disposal of the turf, as well as the synthetics’ role in contributing microplastics (PDF) to the soil and waterways over the course of the fields’ installed lives, consistently portray an ominous situation developing. A few themes emerged as we read academic research out of Sweden, Denmark, and the UK. To sum it up: Researchers can’t pinpoint an exact measure of the microplastics entering waterways via runoff from synthetic pitches, but conservative estimates put the number well into the hundreds of kilograms per pitch per year, with some estimates reaching into the thousands. In Sweden, synthetic sports fields are believed to be the second-highest contributor (PDF) of microplastics into waterways, with only “road wear and abrasion of tires” dispersing more of the stuff via roadway runoff. And that’s actually a reduction—officials in that country previously recognized the issue and took steps to mitigate it (PDF)—yet researchers still believe there are hundreds of kilograms of microplastics emerging from each field. In Norway, one researcher found microplastics in 85% of the soil samples (PDF) collected from the bottom sediments of streams near artificial-grass pitches. In the US, there is relatively scant research on this topic, and although the impact of runoff within the 265 million square feet of installed synthetic grass is uncertain, it’s clearly not nothing.