Joel Rheinberger
A couple of weeks ago, one of my producers stepped onto artificial turf on a hot day and burned the bottoms of her feet. Associate Professor Sebastian Pfautsch from Western Sydney University has been studying exactly this issue.
Sebastian Pfautsch
You have a very dark material already, which has a relatively low thermal mass, and I'll show you that in a moment what that means. And the backing is black. So normally the green grass blades are sewn onto black material. So now you have the perfect storm where you have a light thermal mass material which can heat up very quickly under normal light conditions. So a nice summer day, you know, you have 28 degrees, you want to play outside. That material can heat up very, very quickly in the morning. 10, 11 o'clock, you can reach 80 degrees easily. 80 degrees! And we see 80 degrees already at about 27, 28. Just a normal, beautiful blue sky summer day. You don't need 35 plus and you don't really need 45 plus where you shouldn't be on that material anyway because it's too hot to play outside already.
Joel Rheinberger
Are the local councils that tend to install this stuff starting to realise and starting to change?
Sebastian Pfautsch
Some are catching on to it and really pick up on the environmental impacts, heat included. Others are still pushing forward because they're under such pressure from the community and also from lobby groups, even internally, to install these synthetic particular sports fields because the argument is that therefore they can prolong the use hours of their sports facilities.
Joel Rheinberger
Now what does this mean for houses that have AstroTurf outside?
Sebastian Pfautsch
Well, like your co-producer said, she couldn't walk on that stuff. So there will be times in summer where you can't be in your garden. Full stop. That's it. Also, you are completely warming the microclimate, particularly during the day and the afternoon hours around your house. That means you need more cooling electricity. And then you have the problem of microplastics and environmental pollution that comes from this material. And that doesn't matter if it's on a large sports field or it happens in the backyard where you went to a do-it-yourself store and bought a few square metres of that stuff. The microplastic problem doesn't go away and it is really severe. We find it now in the aquatic food chain. This material has been tracked from sports fields and even from playgrounds, from schools, into local waterways, into aquatic organisms, and then back to us into our food chain. So there's some really severe issues related. And we haven't even talked about the PFAS or the forever chemicals that are related to this material and other issues. So it's really critical to understand that it's not just, hey, I don't need to mow anymore, but the follow-on effects. There's no recycling of this material. At the moment, I think that building one recycling plant, so everything that you would create after its use, it goes straight to landfill. Many other issues that are related to synthetic turf that are unresolved.
