I have been playing ultimate frisbee for four years now, and yes, I am one of those people that refers to it solely as ‘ultimate’ (sorry not sorry). Because of this, I have spent a good amount of time diving, falling, and just downright missing the disc on artificial turf fields. Four years later, and I’m still looking like a fool out there. For those of you un-athletic folk out there who are unfamiliar with artificial turf fields, they are engineered fields that are made to fit the look of a normal grass field. Turf fields have three main layers. The top layer consists of plastic blades that simulate the look of regular grass, the second layer is black turf pellets that support the plastic grass and help provide cushion and support, and the bottom layer of carpet helps with drainage (Cheng et al., 2014). Turf fields are appealing and used a lot because they don’t require fertilizers or pesticides, they don’t need to be watered, and they’re just so damn aesthetically pleasing! I mean, who doesn’t dream about taking a moonlit walk with their beloved on an artificial turf field? I know I do.
Anywho, the most controversial layer, and the layer I will be discussing in this post, is the second layer comprised of those black turf pellets that infamously get everywhere. And when I say everywhere, I mean EVERYWHERE. All of us athletes know what I am talking about here. It is not a fun time trying to clean all of those up. Soccer players, ultimate players, football players, hell, any sport on turf fields that requires you to jump around and fall a lot. Artificial turf fields are the reason I trickle those pesky little pellets all through my house after practice and manage to find them in every single orifice after I finally decide to take a shower. They are the reason my roommate secretly hates that I play ultimate. She won’t say it, but I know she’s thinking it.
But could these pellets be harmful? They’re so darn cute and small!
After my years of playing ultimate frisbee, I got to thinking, “could these little guys potentially be harmful?” After all, whenever I lay out or fall hard to the ground, they usually end up in my scrapes and wounds. Is that okay?! It also gets very hot (especially here in Texas), and sometimes when I fall on the turf, I notice the pellets get really, really warm, which is kind of concerning. Are there chemicals that could be harmful to me, and could I be breathing them in? After all, being an athlete, you are usually going to be breathing at heavier rates (especially if you’re out of shape like me!). The concern over turf fields has actually grown over the years, stemming from the increased incidences of cancer in goalkeepers. The whole job of a goalkeeper is to dive onto the turf to stop goals, so they are regularly exposed to the turf pellets (Luzer, 2016, p. 3). This is very scary, and a valid cause for concern.
Many of you may be thinking, “but how could these pellets hurt me? It’s not like I eat them!”. This is true! It is unlikely that athletes are going to ingest a significant amount of turf pellets or even any, and it is even more unlikely they will consume them like this man consumes those cakes. In fact, when discussing this issue with some parents, they have talked about how their children do actually put these pellets in their mouths. But that is beside the point here. In this blog, I will consider two main ways that athletes can be exposed to the substances in turf pellets: through dermal uptake and inhalation. Dermal uptake refers to chemicals absorbed through the skin, typically through scraping the skin and reopening wounds. This would be like from a goalkeeper diving over and over to stop the ball from getting in the goal and repeatedly breaking their skin, or an ultimate frisbee player diving to catch the disc for the game-winning point in the end-zone. Athletes refer to this as “turf burn,” and although it looks really pretty cool and is a token of a dedicated (maybe crazy) player, it most definitely hurts! The turf pellets also love to cling on those open wounds. Inhalation refers to breathing in chemicals released from the turf, which, as I mentioned before, can have a large impact on athletes because of higher rates of breathing.
What’s exactly is in a turf pellet?!
Turf pellets are made from recycled tires, and I know what you’re thinking, “how environmentally friendly!” I thought that also. But even if it seems to be environmentally friendly in the sense of recycling and being resourceful, we should be asking, “are they human-friendly?”. After all, we are the most important thing in this universe, aren’t we?
Anyways, hold onto your hats, I’m about to throw some science at you! So what’s in these recycled tire pieces? Well, turf pellets consist of a multitude of different metals, including zinc, magnesium, aluminum and barium (Bocca et al., 2009). I bet you remember a few of those from the periodic table of elements in middle school chemistry class! However, the presence of Zinc is typically found at higher concentrations than the other metals (Bocca et al., 2009). It has also been proven that these tiny pellets contain numerous amounts of air pollutants, including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs.
Additionally, there is also the presence of SVOCs, or semi-volatile organic compounds, which are usually found because of the decomposition of the tires into pellets (Cheng et al., 2014). There are evidently a lot of substances in these turf pellets, and that should be cause for concern in my opinion. I’m just on artificial turf fields to have a good time and dive for discs that I most definitely won’t catch, not to interact with all these chemicals!
So what are the implications of all that science?!
Well, lucky for you, there have been a few studies testing the effects of low dose exposure to a few of these prominent substances found in turf pellets! Yippee! These studies have primarily been done on animals, but animal testing is often used because animals can be good models of humans. The first study examined the “sub-acute oral exposure to zinc oxide nanoparticles” in mice (Sharma et al., 2012). The mice were exposed orally to a small number of zinc nanoparticles (300 mg/kg) for 14 consecutive days. The results showed that this small exposure to zinc nanoparticles caused liver damage in the rats. I feel very bad for these rats, and also, this raises concern for my health, and the health of other athletes, playing on turf fields all the time. But wait, there’s more! Another study looked at the effects of low-dose exposure to Benzopyrene (BaP), a PAH found commonly in the turf pellets. It exposed Zebrafish to different levels of BaP for 230 days, and then analyzed them for any physiological changes. The conclusion was that with this chronic low dose exposure to BaP, symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease began to show for the fish exposed, with effects like memory loss (Gao et al., 2015). I don’t know about you, but I’m not looking to lose my memory anytime soon. Another study found that the inhalation exposure to Benzopyrene in turf is between .01 ng/m3 and .4 ng/m3 (Menichini et al., 2011). This is a relatively small amount, but chronic exposure to athletes over time could lead to serious health effects. You should be concerned, my friend!
Real life examples of exposure
Still thinking there’s no way those tiny pellets could expose you to chemicals? Let me give you some examples of real-life exposures found through a few studies. First of all, Van Rooij & Jongeneelen had seven football players play a match of football on a turf field and ensured that the football players came in contact a lot with the turf, through sliding and crawling. The football players had two-and-a-half hours of playtime, and their urine was tested afterward for pyrene, a substance that is always found in a PAH mixture (Van Rooij & Jongeneelen, 2009). They found that PAHs were present in the urine. Although it was only in small amounts, it is clear that athletes can dermally uptake these harmful substances.This study could be translated into many sports that have a lot of sliding around, like soccer and ultimate frisbee and american football. Most sports are going to have people falling down, because let’s be honest, gravity isn’t really on our side when we’re playing sports. Another study done by Marsili looked at the inhalation risks associated with playing on turf fields on notably hot days. If you thought playing sports in the scorching sun was already bad, it could be made worse by playing on turf! At the end of the study, they concluded that, through evaporation, there is the continuous release of PAHs from the rubber pellets, and that this toxicity is “far from negligible” and would provide a substantial amount of PAH daily intake for an athlete (Marsili et al., 2017, p. 7). It was concluded that this amount of toxic substances released through evaporation when the turf heats up isn’t safe for public health and that there should be a concern. It seems to me that these turf fields maybe aren’t as cool as they look.
Don’t worry! You don’t have to install artificial turf field in your backyard!
Don’t fret, there are other options! There is the possibility of risk with artificial turf fields, so why use them? Why keep using substances that could harm us and our children if we have lots of other resources out there? First of all, the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, an organization in Pennsylvania that works hard to keep their river clean from toxins and chemicals, suggests some alternative options and recommendations for fields. They suggest using “organic infill materials” such as combinations of using parts of a coconut along with cork and shells (“Alternative Infills for Artificial Turf”, n.d.). These organic options are going to be less toxic, and the coconut could smell great! In my opinion, I would feel a lot more comfortable running around on fields that I know only have organic substances. Also, if I ever have kids someday, I would additionally feel better about them playing sports if it wasn’t on fields with suspicious pesky little black pellets that will plague our house incessantly. Moreover, according to an employee at Hill Country Synthetic Turf, a turf company in Austin, Texas, many sports turf fields that are being created today are no longer using recycled tire rubber, but are using rubber that is specifically made for the turf fields. Tire rubber is created to improve the performance of cars on asphalt, which presents a very different set of demands than what athletes need to play on turf fields. When rubber is created specifically for turf fields, it’s possible to remove some specific harmful chemicals that are unnecessary and get an overall better product. So if you’re looking to install artificial turf field in your backyard, you can make sure it is this type of artificial turf field, without recycled rubber! There are other options out there, so don’t you worry.
Works Cited
Alternative Infills for Artificial Turf (Rep.). (n.d.). Bristol, PA: Delaware Riverkeeper Network.
Bocca, B., Forte, G., Petrucci, F., Costantini, S., & Izzo, P. (2009). Metals contained and leached from rubber granulates used in synthetic turf areas. Science of the Total Environment, 2183–2190.
Cheng, H., Hu, Y., & Reinhard, M. (2014). Environmental and Health Impacts of Artificial Turf: A Review. Environmental Science & Technology, 2114–2129.
Gao, D., Wu, M., Wang, C., Wang, Y., & Zuo, Z. (2015). Chronic exposure to low benzo[a]pyrene level causes neurodegenerative disease-like syndromes in zebrafish (Danio rerio). Aquatic Toxicology, 167, 200–208.
[Gif of man diving for a frisbee] Retrieved from https://giphy.com/gifs/show-frisbee-bH7dosChKZdTy/links
[Gif of man eating food] Retrieved from https://giphy.com/gifs/weezer-music-video-california-kids-xThuWcu8nwBhazm0Fi/links
[Gif of man falling on field] Retrieved from https://giphy.com/gifs/soccer-basketball-DAFeLDS7XuYWA
Luzer, D. (2016). Artificial Turf and Cancer Risk. National Cancer Institute, 108, 2–4.
Marsili, L., Coppola, D., Bianchi, N., Maltese, S., Bianchi, M., & Cristina, M. (2014). Release ofPolycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons and Heavy Metals from Rubber Crumb in Synthetic Turf Fields: Preliminary Hazard Assessment for Athletes. Environmental & Analytical Toxicology, 5(2), 1–8.
Mcdonald, Thomas [Photograph of hand and artificial turf field] Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/28turfwe.html
Menichini, E., Abate, V., Attias, L., De Luca, S., Di Domenico, A., Fochi, I., . . . Bocca, B.(2011). Artificial-turf playing fields: Contents of metals, PAHs, PCBs, PCDDs and PCDFs, inhalation exposure to PAHs and related preliminary risk assessment. Science of The Total Environment, 409(23), 4950–4957.
Sharma, V., Singh, P., Pandey, A. K., & Dhawan, A. (2012). Induction of oxidative stress, DNA damage and apoptosis in mouse liver after sub-acute oral exposure to zinc oxide nanoparticles. Mutation Research, 745, 84–91.
Van Rooij, J. G., & Jongeneelen, F. J. (2010). Hydroxypyrene in urine of football players after playing on artificial sports fields with tire crumb infill. International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health, 105–110.
