By Doug Wood

Last week the Board of Health in Oak Bluffs, Mass., banned the installation of artificial turf anywhere in the town. The reason was simple: The safety and integrity of the community’s water supply was deemed more important than an all-weather sports field.

Also last week, the scientific community dropped a figurative bomb on the United Nations conference in Ottawa, where delegates from around the world were negotiating a worldwide plastic treaty. The news that microscopic pieces of plastic have been found in the placentas, eyeballs and other organs of the human body turned the meeting on its head, while the oil and gas lobby worked desperately to save the plastic industry—their only remaining off-ramp as the world shuns burning fossil fuels for energy.

At first, these two events might seem unrelated, but I assure you they are not. And they portend a sea change in the way we think about artificial turf fields.

For years we have known about the terrible environmental cost of an artificial turf sports field. It’s a multi-ton plastic carpet that can never be recycled. It will be here on Earth long after everyone reading this column is long gone. It’s made from a combination of fossil fuels and toxic chemicals, including PFAS – the “forever” chemicals that have been in the news recently because of their cancer-causing and endocrine-disrupting potential. The crumb rubber used to cushion the fields brings with it another full array of chemicals that are just as hazardous.

Young athletes are exposed to this panoply of synthetic chemicals as they inhale noxious fumes and particles from the field, absorb them through their skin when sliding or falling, or accidentally ingest them. If those same chemicals were accidentally dumped on a school field, the area would be quickly cordoned off and workers in hazmat suits would be brought in to clean up the mess.

Those chemicals don’t stay on the field, of course. As the field is groomed, during athletic play, on a windy day, or during a storm, the toxic chemicals escape into the environment where they wreak havoc on our natural world, our water and our own bodies.

But now the environmental issues associated with artificial turf are running headlong into another, even more significant problem: plastic pollution as a public health issue. The Ottawa conference, originally designed to limit the amount of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans, will instead take up the issue of plastic as a human health threat and will focus on taking steps to reduce its production.

And that brings us to the question of artificial turf fields and whose decision it should be as to whether a community wants to burden its citizens with acres of more plastic at a time when science is clearly shouting “Stop!”

Here’s what we know: tiny pieces of plastic and their constituent chemicals are imperiling our air, our water and our bodies. They are found in the soil, the trees, and in our fruit and vegetables. They are found in fish, beef, pork, chicken and even tofu. Plastic is everywhere, including places where it can do real damage.

Here’s what we don’t know: how many chemical-laden nano-plastic particles are released off a giant plastic carpet during a football game? How many are released on a windy day, or when the field is “groomed”? How many are released from the crumb rubber used to cushion the field? (Tires are more plastic than rubber.)

How many of those nano-plastics are being ingested by young athletes, and how many are being ingested by the homeowners who live nearby? What amount of plastic particles from an artificial turf field end up in local streams or bays and the fish who swim there, and how many eventually seep into the underground aquifers that provide our drinking water?

Very soon we will all have to learn to live without plastic bottles of water. We’ll learn to use paper instead of plastic for our trash. Our take-out containers will be made not from plastic but from recycled cardboard, and we’ll wrap our boats in canvas for the winter instead of giant sheets of white plastic.

But these good steps toward reducing our use of plastic pale against the impact of stopping even a single artificial turf field, not to mention several, as are currently being planned in our community. Tons and tons and tons of new plastic is not what any community needs right now.

While scientists race to figure out how our bodies will respond to an onslaught of foreign synthetic chemicals, some of which are known to cause serious or fatal diseases, buying acres of more plastic doesn’t seem like the responsible thing to do.  And now that we know that the installation of artificial turf has community-wide, irreversible negative public health impacts as well as significant environmental costs, the most important question is, who should be empowered to make that risk-benefit decision?

This is no longer a decision that should be taken by any small group of stakeholders. This is a community-wide decision, and should take into account those who will be most affected, both by the tragic and costly environmental legacy as well as their own health; our kids.