Prof Hugh Durrant-Whyte, the NSW chief scientist, concluded in his June report that “both rubber infill and turf fibre blades from synthetic turf fields are found in waterways in NSW” and that the “amount of turf fibres lost from a synthetic turf field is likely to be in the hundreds of kilograms per year”. The report recommended more research into its impacts and that measures be taken to mitigate environmental risks. But he stopped short of suggesting it should be banned.
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Last week, the directors of the Total Environment Centre and its Australian Microplastic Assessment Project (Ausmap) wrote to the NSW environment minister, Penny Sharpe, calling for a five-year moratorium on new planning and approvals for synthetic grass fields, and to subject existing fields to “pollution mitigation measures as soon as possible”.
Dr Michelle Blewitt, an Ausmap director, says early results from recent stormwater sampling, which tested microplastic loss from a north-west Sydney turf field, showed that up to 70,000 particles of rubber crumb and more than 50,000 particles of synthetic grass were captured in a single trap sample.
“In most of these fields … there’s no traps or any devices to contain the loss of these grass pieces going into the environment. We’re finding them very regularly in our samples across the country,” Blewitt says.
Crumb rubber is of particular environmental concern because the material degrades when exposed to the sun and contains “thousands of other chemicals that are included into tyres during their manufacture,” says Dr Shima Ziajahromi, of Griffith University’s Australian Rivers Institute.
