
How Safe Is the Artificial Turf Your Child Plays On? - spking
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/how-safe-artificial-turf-your-child-plays-n220166
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anigbrowl
_Since then, the material has become increasingly popular. Municipalities
across the country have floated multi-million-dollar bonds to pay for new
fields. Local leaders, some facility managers and companies say that turf
costs less than natural grass to maintain, and can withstand heavy use year-
round._

Given the relatively high costs of installation, it ought to be possible to
cross-reference public expenditures on artificial turf and changes in health
trends at fairly high resolution. Interestingly, baseball, which pioneered the
use of artificial turf, has now largely abandoned it and gone back to the real
thing: [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/22/sports/soccer/22iht-
ARENA....](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/22/sports/soccer/22iht-
ARENA.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

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001sky
Offgassing of VOCs from inexpensive vulcanized tire and tool rubber
(particularly from "made in china" manufactured goods) can vary greatly. This
can be empirically varified at any hardware store or home depot. Ingestion or
incorporation of these off-gassing materials into the human bloodstream would
are really beyond the scope of their OEM purposes/safety. By contrast, compare
silicone rubber (widely believed to by 'hypoallergenic') with previous natural
and synthetic rubbers. In applications from scuba diving to medical and food
service applications, its clear that not all such things are create equal.

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adwf
I don't get why they don't just play on grass? Surely it doesn't cost that
much to maintain. When the grass gets too worn in England, you know what we
play on? Mud.

Given that I know of amateur playing fields that have a dozen matches every
weekend with absolutely no maintenance done at all, I find it weird that
artificial turf is so common in the US. Even if it were a watering problem,
there's nothing too bad with playing on dry grass.

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boucher
This may interest you:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/25/upshot/parks-and-
recreatio...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/25/upshot/parks-and-recreation-
comes-to-life-in-san-francisco.html?_r=0)

The city of San Francisco claims they will get at least twice as much use out
of the turf than grass.

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adwf
They also claim that they can't play when the grass is wet. Am I just a crazy
Englishman for thinking that's bizarre?

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cafard
Playing on wet grass can really chew up the turf. No doubt this depends on how
much the field is used.

~~~
adwf
Yeah, but that's just about the case in every amateur match out there isn't
it? We're only talking about kids matches here, not pro football. The purpose
of the pitch is to be played on, not to look pretty. Case in point:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sj9KD-
kjLMY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sj9KD-kjLMY)

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parennoob
Completely irrespective of whether there is a strong causative link between
these things and cancer -- If I were a parent, I'm not sure I'd want my child
inhaling little grains of tire rubber while playing soccer. They contain a ton
of arbitrary hydrocarbons, whose health risks are often unknown and unclear.

While the 10-year studies are being conducted, I'd either make my child play
on real grass if possible, or, at least, in a position where they came into
minimal contact with this stuff.

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garyrichardson
I thought this article was going to be about ACL and ankle injuries. I've
played a lot of ultimate frisbee. My anecdotal evidence says that ACL and
ankle injuries are an order of magnitude higher on turf than grass.

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cjensen
Sure sounds like the Clustering Illusion[1] to me. Just another Erin
Brockovich-style failure[2] to understand statistics.

[1]
[http://www.skepdic.com/clustering.html](http://www.skepdic.com/clustering.html)

[2]
[http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2013/03/cancer_cluster_in_toms_river_new_jersey_the_link_to_a_superfund_site_is.html)

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mpdehaan2
The possible break in this is: "Since then, Griffin has compiled a list of 38
American soccer players -- 34 of them goalies". This at least seems to
correlate something goalie related, provided Griffin was not drawing from a
data-pool that was biased towards goalies.

It might correlate something else that goalies do, or some mental desire to be
a goalie with a weird genetic variant, and so on, but it seems interesting
that the position is a factor.

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cjensen
Griffin is, perhaps without intending to, doing exactly what you hope she
isn't: she's making a list of goalies in the US who have cancer. Who else is
going to contact her to get their name on the list?

The act of collecting a list is an error since the data collected is entirely
meaningless. Here's how she should be doing it: randomly select a few cities
in the US, then check the cancer rate among soccer players in those cities.

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cblock811
correlation != causation

