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Turf Wars at Pierson and Beyond

Thu, 03/10/2022 - 11:15

Where some see level playing fields, others see a list of health hazards

In the Sag Harbor School District, where voters rejected turf playing fields in favor of natural grass six years ago, the issue is coming to the fore again.
Christine Sampson

The playing field at the Pierson Middle High School in Sag Harbor is indeed a quagmire. Or an ice rink, or a sandbox, depending on the time of year.

In 2016 Sag Harbor School District residents voted 1,016 to 135 in favor of a real grass playing field over a synthetic turf option. Alex Kriegsman, a Sag Harbor School Board member who opposed the synthetic field then, recently acknowledged that the grass field “doesn’t seem to be working out the way we hoped.”

The issue is now back on the agenda after the school announced that the grass fields are in poor condition and that the architectural and engineering firm H2M made a “pro-bono” offer to oversee replacement of the grass with artificial turf. The administration will reconsider the turf option.

Farther afield, East Hampton Town officials are planning to use artificial turf for the new Little League fields set to be relocated from Pantigo Place to town-owned property off Stephen Hand’s Path.

“We are aligned with the Little League board of directors, as we are in the business of children playing baseball and softball. The fields planned are best suited for this goal and we feel strongly that sport turf is the right choice for this project,” Tim Garneau, an East Hampton Town trustee who is serving as chairman of a committee guiding the relocation of the town’s Little League fields, wrote in an email to The Star.

The line on the pitch — whatever its surface — is clearly drawn.

On one side, the anti-turf folks say that fake grass is exactly that — fake, made of hazardous materials like polyethylene and polypropylene, the very production of which emits carbon and uses fossil fuels. Then there are the potential health risks of exposure to materials used in its production, such as microplastics, synthetic chemicals, and the so-called crumb rubber made from recycled car tires. In 2020, members of the United States Senate requested reinstating a stalled research study to investigate crumb rubber’s health effects on humans. There’s also the fact that when the synthetic surface is replaced — its shelf life is about 10 years — it won’t biodegrade, so off it goes to a landfill. It’s a barren carpet, some say, that will repel insects and dismantle the precious ecosystem that exists in soil. Imagine a robin landing on fake turf and quizzically pecking at the ground, looking for worms.

The mental confusion of birds and other small creatures is about the furthest thing on the minds of the group on the other side. In Sag Harbor, their main concern is that students who play high school sports at Pierson have a home field that is comparable to those of their opponents. Because the majority of schools on Long Island, including East Hampton, have artificial turf, Sag Harbor athletes are at a disadvantage, the group says. In fact, the Pierson varsity field hockey team opted to play nearly all its games on the road last season, simply to play on artificial turf. Furthermore, this group contends, a grass field maintained on a small school’s budget will never be durable or reliable enough to withstand bad weather. It will never be a level playing field.

“Sooner or later somebody has to answer the question: Is turf dangerous or not?” asked Eric Bramoff, the former Pierson athletic director, who now occupies that role in the Oyster Bay district, where they have turf. “There’s no definitive answer. So the reality is if the Sag Harbor community can get a definitive answer on whether or not it’s safe, then they can make an educated choice on that.”

Across the water on Nantucket on Tuesday, the plan to install two artificial turf fields at the district’s public schools was reported to be put on hold. According to the article in The Nantucket Current, “the $17.5 million project, which has been in the works for years, had in recent months become mired in the debate over PFAS, the so-called forever chemicals that are suspected to increase the risk of kidney and testicular cancers, as well as other health conditions, and are used during the manufacturing process for turf fields.”

In Sag Harbor, Susan Lamontagne, a media and messaging strategist specializing in public health, health care, children’s health, and environmental health, had much to say about the potential health risks of playing on turf.

“It’s exasperating that these toxic synthetic turfs keep getting installed in schools and communities. And we know more about what’s in them since we battled this topic in Sag Harbor a number of years ago,” she said, adding, “There is no ‘healthy’ artificial option. That’s industry greenwashing.”

Ms. Lamontagne forwarded a study conducted by Northwestern University’s PFAS Project Lab, published in 2019, in which Graham Peaslee, a professor of nuclear physics at the University of Notre Dame who has spent the last five years studying PFAS, explained that, “Without the PFAS, the rigid plastic used to make the turf durable clogged up the extruding machines that make the turf.” They are therefore necessary in the turf-making process.

The study also shed light on crumb rubber — some 40,000 tires are shredded to cover a single artificial turf field — containing heavy metals and other chemicals shown to pose serious health risks. 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.

For Alex Matthiessen, who lives full time in Sag Harbor but whose son does not attend school on the East End, the environmental damage of artificial turf is most concerning. Mr. Matthiessen is a partner of Natural Ventures, an impact investment and advisory firm backing green companies looking to save the planet. He bemoans the monumental disconnection between humans and the natural world that comes with the proliferation of artificial fields.

“What we want is the Village of Sag Harbor and the Sag Harbor School Board to undertake some kind of environmental assessment and cost assessment of artificial turf versus grass,” he said. “And even if there is a cost savings for turf, you also have to look at the environmental debt, the potential injuries that these kids could suffer, and also just the quality of the experience. I’ve played a lot of sports and 10 times out of 10, I’d rather play on a natural grass field rather than a hard artificial surface.”

Neither the tactile experience of real grass nor the potential health hazards of the plastic kind concern Beth Rascelles, a teacher at the Sag Harbor Elementary School with two high school-age children who are athletes. She is mostly irked by the fact that her older daughter left Pierson to join St. Anthony’s High School in South Huntington, specifically for their sports program, which includes a turf field.


Note: This story has been updated to remove a reference to artificial turf at Mashashimuet Park.

 


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