Boston’s mayor, Michelle Wu, has ordered no new artificial turf to be installed in city parks, making Boston the largest municipality in a small but growing number around the nation to limit use of the product because it contains dangerous chemicals.

All artificial turf is made with toxic PFAS compounds and some is still produced with ground-up tires that can contain heavy metals, benzene, VOCs and other carcinogens that can present a health threat. The material also emits high levels of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and sheds microplastics and other chemicals into waterways.

“We already know there are toxic chemicals in the products, so why would we continue to utilize them and have children roll around on them when we have a safe alternative, which is natural grass?” asked Sarah Evans, an environmental health professor for the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Beyond chemical risks, the fields can act as heat islands that increase playing field temperatures to as much as 93C (200F), Evans noted. National Football League players are pressing the league to ban artificial turf because of injuries, while the US national soccer teams will only play on natural grass for the same reason.

The federal government estimates 12,000 synthetic turf fields exist in the US, and at least 1,200 more are installed annually. Proponents say they are easier to maintain than grass fields and are not prone to “flooding”, although they do also require significant maintenance. The product is also increasingly used on playgrounds or as alternatives to lawns in drought-plagued regions.

But in recent years, municipalities have begun limiting their use via bans or moratoriums, including at least four in Massachusetts before Boston, two in California’s Bay Area and several in Connecticut.

In a statement to the Guardian, a spokesperson for Wu said: “The city has a preference for grass playing surfaces wherever possible and will not be installing playing surfaces with PFAS chemicals moving forward.”

Elsewhere, battles over proposed artificial fields are playing out. In Martha’s Vineyard, the school district is suing the city for prohibiting an artificial field from being installed because of concerns that it would contaminate an aquifer from which the town draws its drinking water. Meanwhile, voters in Malden, just north of Boston, may settle a heated debate over a proposed artificial field.

In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, city officials thought they had ordered a PFAS-free artificial turf field, but later testing revealed that it contained high levels of the chemicals. A state-level proposal to ban artificial turf recently failed in Massachusetts, and public health advocates and legislators in another state are planning to propose a ban on the material, though they declined to say on the record which state until the proposal is introduced.

Artificial turf is made with several layers including plastic grass blades, plastic backing that holds the blades in place and infill that weighs down the turf and helps blades stand upright. Until recently, infill was always made with recycled rubber tires called crumb rubber. However, independent and Environmental Protection Agency testing found the material contains high levels of dangerous chemicals.

“It seems kind of nonsensical to put ground-up tires in a field where children are playing,” said Kyla Bennett, a former EPA official and director of science policy at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Peer).

Some companies have begun using cork as infill, but industry has said the grass blades and backing cannot be made without PFAS.

PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of about 12,000 chemicals often used to make products resist water, stain and heat. They are called “forever chemicals” because they don’t naturally break down, and are linked to cancer, liver problems, thyroid issues, birth defects, kidney disease, decreased immunity and other serious health problems.

PFAS can be absorbed through the skin, inhaled, ingested or get in open wounds as they break off from the plastic blades, and children are considered more vulnerable to exposure because they are smaller and their bodies are still developing.

Some manufacturers have claimed the amount of PFAS used in artificial turf isn’t high enough to be dangerous, or that they use “safe” PFAS. “Independent research has shown time and time again that synthetic turf systems provide many community benefits and continue to meet and exceed regulatory standards for human health, safety and performance,” the Synthetic Turf Council, an industry trade group, said in a statement to the Guardians.

But no studies have been completed on how PFAS or other chemicals move from artificial turf to children, so the industry doesn’t know if it’s safe, Evans said. Moreover, the fields are another of myriad potential daily exposures to PFAS in consumer products, food and water, Evans said.

Public health advocates note all PFAS studies have been found to accumulate in the environment and be toxic to humans, and, once in the environment, “safe” compounds used in manufacturing break down into unsafe chemicals.

Testing of multiple artificial fields has found the presence of highly toxic PFAS compounds like 6:2 FTOH and PFOS. The EPA recently revised its health advisory for PFOS to state that effectively no level of exposure in drinking water is safe.

“It’s only a matter of time before [artificial turf] is banned,” Bennett said. “In a few years we’re going to be asking, ‘How on Earth did we ever allow this to happen?'”

PFAS chemicals have been identified in synthetic turf, according to lab tests performed on several samples of the artificial grass that were shared with The Intercept. The presence of the chemicals, members of a class that has been associated with multiple health problems, including cancer, adds to growing concerns about the grass replacement that covers many thousands of acres in parks, schools, professional sports stadiums, and practice fields around the U.S.

In one set of tests, the PFAS chemicals were detected in the plastic backing of two samples of the turf. In another, in which the “blades” of the artificial grass were analyzed, scientists measured significant levels of fluorine, which is seen as an indication of the presence of the chemicals.

“We’re seeing unexplained levels of fluorine-based compounds in all of the eight samples of turf grass blades we’ve looked at,” says Jeff Gearhart of the Ecology Center, a nonprofit environmental research group based in Michigan that tested the turf blades. The samples of the blades that tested positive for fluorine were made by two different companies, Shaw Industries and Turf Factory Direct.

Neither Turf Factory Direct nor Shaw Industries responded to requests for comment for this story.

PFAS chemicals are used widely to help with the molding and extrusions of plastic, according to a 2005 paper from the Journal of Vinyl and Additive Technology. The latest version of the synthetic turf, which is prized for its durability, is made with plastic polymers that are molded into the shape of grass blades when in molten form.

“When you extrude plastic, it’s like a cookie cutter,” explained Graham Peaslee, a professor of nuclear physics at the University of Notre Dame who has spent the last five years studying PFAS compounds. Without the PFAS, the rigid plastic used to make the turf durable clogged up the extruding machines that make the turf. “So they added fluorochemicals and now it runs through the extruders just fine.” While other chemicals can also ease the turf-making process, “the fluorinated ones work the best,” said Peaslee, who likened the PFAS in turf to “chemical hitchhikers” that are left over from the processing rather than used as ingredients.

The Synthetic Turf Council did not respond to specific questions about the presence of PFAS in turf. In an emailed response to questions from The Intercept, Dan Bond, president and chief executive officer of the Synthetic Turf Council, wrote that “STC members are at the forefront of technology that continuously improves the durability, performance and end of life uses of synthetic turf systems.”

Crumb Rubber

Any threats posed by the PFAS in the blades and backing of turf add to questions that were already swirling about the crumb rubber sprinkled over it. In 2014, soccer coach Amy Griffin realized that an alarming number of goalkeepers had developed cancer after playing on turf fields and began tallying all the athletes she could find in the same situation. By January 2019, her list included 260 young football, baseball, lacrosse, and soccer players with cancer. Griffin has repeatedly called for more research. But so far, scientists have focused on the chemicals in the crumb rubber spread over turf and not on the other components of the plastic grass.

The first artificial turf, Monsanto’s “Chemgrass,” was rolled out in the Houston Astrodome in the 1960s. The prominent product placement served to not only help coin the best known brand name in fake fields — “AstroTurf” — it also launched the turf era, in which billions of dollars’ worth of green plastic carpets have replaced much of the real grass that had naturally coated sports fields up to this point.

As its manufacturers have pointed out, turf eliminates the needs for watering, mowing, and pesticides — and the turf industry trade group, the Synthetic Turf Council, counts “a host of environmental benefits” among its selling points. The latest version of artificial turf is made of bright green plastic blades attached to a sod-like base. In order to make the blades stand up in a passable imitation of grass, most synthetic turf has, since the late 1990s, required some sort of “infill,” usually crumb rubber made from shredded tires. The tiny bits of rubber are dumped on top of the blades and, according to the Synthetic Turf Council, give the turf “the look and playability of lush grass.”

But the mix of chemicals composing today’s turf are decidedly not grass. The rubber, which is used in huge amounts (some 40,000 tires are shredded to cover a single artificial turf field), contains heavy metals and other chemicals shown to pose serious health risks. Environmental groups have taken issue with the health risks of turf. And the Children’s Environmental Health Center of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai deemed the fake grass so dangerous it called for a moratorium on new artificial fields in 2017.

In July, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry issued the first of two reports on the recycled crumb rubber, which found dozens of metals and volatile and semi-volatile organic compounds in the black rubber specks. Several of these compounds — including cadmium, benzene, nickel, chromium, and arsenic — are known carcinogens.

The EPA cautioned that “risks cannot be inferred from the information and conclusions found in this study” and promised that a second study to be released at a later, unspecified date will look at the exposures and risks of people who play on these fields. Yet on a webpage about the study, the agency assures visitors that “while chemicals are present as expected in the tire crumb rubber, human exposure appears to be limited.”

The turf industry welcomed the EPA study as evidence that their product doesn’t cause harm, but others criticized the agency’s reassurances as premature. The environmental group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility went so far as to call for the EPA to retract the July report. Kyla Bennett, PEER’s science policy director, criticized the federal agency for not offering evidence for its characterization of the risk from turf as low and for failing to test the crumb rubber for more than half of the chemicals that have been associated with it.

The EPA is reviewing the PEER complaint, according to an agency spokesperson.

Blades and Backing

Bennett was also extremely disappointed that the EPA investigated only the crumb rubber from the fields and not the plastic grass blades and the backing to which they’re attached. So she decided to test them herself. This summer, Bennett and a friend went to a sports field near her home in Massachusetts while new turf was being installed. She secured two samples and sent one of the turf pieces to a lab to be analyzed for the presence of specific PFAS chemicals.

The tests on the turf came back positive for a short-chain PFAS chemical (known as 27619-97-2) that was the subject of risk reports sent to the EPA between 2007 and 2011. While there is little published about the health effects on this chemical, one of those reports, submitted by DuPont in 2009, noted that some rats died after being exposed to the compound. Another noted that the chemical induced chromosomal aberrations in hamsters’ ovary cells. Nevertheless, the chemical was approved for use and is produced in large quantities, according to EPA records.

Bennett sent the other turf piece to the Ecology Center, which found that PFAS were also in the blades of the turf. The center used a new method known as a “total fluorine” analysis. Using this technique, researchers can get a total signal for all of the PFAS that are present in products as opposed to just the 30 or so that they are now able to identify and test for individually.

The Ecology Center’s Gearhart used the total fluorine test to determine that about half of the hundreds of commercial and residential carpeting samples it tested at the beginning of this year contained PFAS. And Peaslee of Notre Dame, who pioneered the total fluorine method, has used it to identify PFAS in food packaging, cosmetics, and in the protective gear worn by firefighters, at “thousands of times over the drinking water limit.”

Discarded Turf

Meanwhile Bennett found another source of turf she could test: 11 rolls of the used field covering that were sitting alongside some bags of crumb rubber a short walk from a field in Franklin, Massachusetts. New turf had been installed on the Franklin field in 2017, and the old turf had been sitting there ever since. So Bennett cut off a piece of the fraying, discarded turf and sent that for testing too. That sample came back positive for PFOS, a chemical that is no longer in use but has been recognized as both a health threat and widespread water contaminant.

Bennett also collected water from a wetland just feet from the rolls of old turf and found that PFOS was in the water as well, suggesting another possible way that this and other PFAS chemicals may been getting into water.

Asked about the discarded turf and the presence of PFOS in both the turf and nearby water, Franklin town administrator Jamie Hellen said that he wasn’t aware that turf contained any dangerous chemicals. Hellen also said that he hadn’t known that the rolls of old turf had been left near the water. Days later, he sent a photo of the spot where the discarded turf had been, showing that the turf was no longer there. Bennett noticed the turf rolls stashed near some trees about a mile away from where it had last been dumped, though the bags of infill were no longer nearby.

In an email, Hellen also wrote, “The Town of Franklin has excellent fields that the community is very proud of and are very safe. The Town invests millions in taxpayer dollars into making our fields the best in the state, always trying to stay on the cutting edge of what technology offers and to have the safest fields for the public.”

Franklin, Massachusetts, is hardly the only place struggling with the problem of how to discard turf once it’s no longer in use. Turf eventually wears out — typically within about a decade of installation — and when it does, it needs to be replaced. Between 1,200 and 1,500 new turf fields are being installed across the country each year, according to estimates from the Synthetic Turf Council.

The infill and turf for a single field can weigh 495,000 pounds, according to an estimate in recycling guidelines found on the Synthetic Turf Council’s website. That document explains that “as with any recycle, reuse and recovery effort, the diversity of component materials may represent economic or technical challenges.” It also notes that “the industry continues to research and identify the most economical and responsible way to process all turf components such as turf plastics, infill(s) and underlayment pads that need to be removed, recycled and reused.”

Failures to dispose of used turf have recently grabbed public attention in Europe. The Dutch public television documentary program Zembla ran an investigative report showing that several companies falsely claimed to recycle turf and have instead stacked it in towering piles. And in Norway, after turf was found discarded in the woods near waterways in June, the minister of the environment said he was considering new rules to control and clean up the dumping of turf.

Although asked repeatedly, the Synthetic Turf Council did not provide the name of any facility currently able to recycle turf in the U.S. But at least one company listed on the trade group’s website does claim to do so. Target Technologies International, Inc., which is based in British Columbia, offers “a one-of-a-kind solution to recycle 100% of your used artificial turf and turn it into useful post-consumer products keeping it from ending up in our landfills, vacant properties and warehouses,” according the copy found in the online buyers’ guide and membership directory of the Synthetic Turf Council.

Asked about the company’s ability to repurpose turf, Target Technologies International did not provide convincing evidence. Although a 2018 report from international soccer governing body FIFA on the environmental impact of turf fields noted that “a full ‘closed-loop’ process is yet to be developed,” Nadia Minato, who answered the phone at the Target Technologies International, said that the company has recycled every bit of “maybe 75 fields” in the past five years by sending the turf to Malaysia, where it is made into “fence posts and different kinds of lumber.”

When asked for details about where exactly in Malaysia the company sends the turf and what happens to it when it gets there, Minato replied that that information was “proprietary.” She then supplied the email address and phone number of Thomas Lam, who she said handles the “leg work” for Target Technologies International’s recycling in Malaysia. In an email sent by a third party, Lam responded to a question about how exactly the company is able to recycle 100 percent of turf with the statement, “This is one of our Trade Secrets.” Asked for the location of the company’s facility and any evidence that it actually recycles turf there, Lam responded that the plant is not open to the public and that “our recycled, marketable and environmentally safe, end product is a plastic fence post and they are available in the USA.”

Whether on a field, dumped in the woods, or sitting in a facility awaiting the advent of effective recycling methods, turf almost certainly ultimately releases its PFAS chemicals, according to Peaslee.

“The question is: Does it come off? And I’m pretty convinced from my previous research on textiles that it does,” he said. “When you expose the fibers to mechanical abrasion, some of these chemicals ooze from the fibers.” For Peaslee, the discovery of PFAS in turf is a troubling indication that the chemicals are likely present in other products for which they were used as a processing aid. “Turf is only the tip of the iceberg. It’s going to happen wherever they’re using PFAS as an extrusion agent,” said Peaslee, who expressed concern that widespread dumping of the turf in landfills and other places may result in water contamination.

For athletes and their parents, the presence of PFAS in turf may raise more immediate concerns about exposure to yet another group of troubling chemicals while playing on the fields. “We just don’t know yet how this might affect people,” said PEER’s Bennett. For her, the unanswered questions about PFAS in turf and in the water near where it is dumped should be met with caution. “Synthetic turf is now causing a risk to everyone who drinks water,” said Bennett, who thinks anyone planning to install turf fields should reconsider. “If there’s a potential for risk,” she said, “just don’t do it.”

DEVELOPERS of poisonous land on the Ravenscraig Hospital public housing site intend to use polluted soil from the poisoned property for a landscaping upgrade project.

Link Group Ltd has filed a planning application with Inverclyde Council to dig contaminated soil from the development site – and transfer it to adjacent land near Pennyfern Road to provide an equipment area.

However, consultants hired by Link have admitted in a letter to the contaminated council land commissioner that the proposal brings with it an accepted way of harming people.

The Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) appealed Link’s plan for the soil – which has confirmed dangerous and carcinogenic chemicals have been exceeded on multiple occasions.

Advisors to Link, Fairhurst, stated in a correspondence sent to the Council on Nov. 24th: “It is recognized that the possibility exists that pollutants are entirely due to pollutants within the site-reclaimed soil intended to be reused within the soil Landscaping improvements are associated with human end-users. ‘

Tele can determine that SEPA objected to the proposal in August because “insufficient information” was submitted.

At this point – three months before its “pollutant linkages” were added to the council – Fairhurst was trying to reassure the Environment Agency that the work would meet criteria that “the use of the soil does not cause pollution or harm to humans Health “.

Fairhurst – who said community planners and residents had “given positive feedback” – told SEPA that the soil earmarked for landscaping contained a number of potentially harmful materials, including arsenic, cadmium, chromium, lead and mercury.

Link advisors repeatedly stressed that landscaping is necessary because it would offer “significant medium and long-term benefits to the community” and without it the selected area would “remain an unusable wet space”.

Fairhurst also told SEPA that the work would “keep the lines of sight open to prevent anti-social behavior and other criminal activity”.

Link filed planning proposals in May to use excess contaminated soil for landscaping, more than a year after the council approved its plan to build 198 social rental houses on the sprawling 83-acre former hospital site.

As with the main development, Link intends to use a “top layer” as a barrier between people and pollutants.

World-renowned contamination expert Professor Andrew Watterson – an advisor to the World Health Organization – previously stated that top layers will ultimately fail.

Fairhurst told SEPA: “The customer (Link) has found a positive way to use excess material from development that will prevent it from being landfilled and the negative environmental and safety effects of the transfer off-site and associated with disposal. ”

A social housing development strategy document produced by Fairhurst for Link states that “non-inert / hazardous waste will incur higher landfill tax rates” when removed from the site.

Fairhurst told the council last month that an assessment had found the materials “suitable for reuse” but added, “Given local overruns [of pollution] An environmental protection layer with 450 mm of clean soil on top of a geotextile separator would be required. ”

SEPA said yesterday that it has withdrawn its objection to the landscape plan.

An environmental agency spokeswoman said: “Initially, we objected to the proposals to reuse land from the adjacent residential area because the applicant did not provide enough information to demonstrate that reuse was necessary and appropriate in line with waste management license requirements and related Guidelines.

“We needed more information to show that the proposal would produce the results reported and was not a disposal activity.

“After submitting more information and redesigning the proposals, including reducing the volume of materials to be used and the footpaths to be introduced, we withdrew our objection.

“We are waiting for the outcome of the Inverclyde Council’s planning decision and their decision on the redevelopment strategy proposed by the developer.”

An eight-month investigation by the Police Scotland Economic Crime Unit into land problems at the Ravenscraig site has not yet been completed.

MSP Stuart McMillan said he had lost confidence in the housing estate and called for it to be stopped while the police investigation was still ongoing.

Link bought the property in March 2017 for £ 1 in a back-to-back deal involving former owners NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde and the Scottish Government’s More Homes Division.

Just months earlier, the district surveyor estimated the land to be worth £ 850,000.

Link decided in July not to answer any further questions from the Telegraph.

The Scottish Government says the land transfer was carried out “in accordance with all due process”.