It gets everywhere. This stuff gets in your hair, your eyes, your ears, every orifice of the body. All of them. It will cake a black dust onto your knees and elbows. You will get it under your jersey and in your shorts.
If you have ever played a sport on a synthetic turf field, you know exactly what I am talking about. The little turf beads that fill the entire field. If you have no clue what I mean, let me drop some knowledge on you.
I play rugby for Davenport University, and I come in contact with turf every day of the week. We have practice on it and we play most of our games on it. I am not exaggerating when I say that these turf beads will get everywhere; it's inevitable.
Over my years of playing on a turf field I have removed pellets from my inner ear days after playing a match. I have ingested more turf that I like to think about. I thought I had scratched my eye during practice. I went into my optometrist to have it looked at and she removed a turf pellet that embedded itself in my eyeball. I know the story sounds pretty cornea, but it happened.
After that bad pun and the turf bead in my eye, I decided to do some research and see if there are any health hazards associated with synthetic turf. Turns out there are.
I found an article on ESPN that went in depth on what this stuff is and how it affects people who use it. In the 90's used tires were becoming a huge landfill problem. The solution was to shred them up into what is called "crumb rubber". One of crumb rubber's main applications is filling artificial turf fields. Some 20,000 to 30,000 tires per field. Initially, this was a brilliant way to re-use old tires and crumb rubber was saving the earth. Now they are questioning the toxicity of these little pieces of rubber. July Foundy came to the conclusion that there may be a correlation with "crumb rubber" ingestion and cancer (Foudy, 2015).
Amy Griffin who is the goalkeeper coach of the University of Washington women's soccer team saw this correlation too. She started putting a list together of athletes who played on crumb rubber fields and got cancer. Her list currently stands at 200 athletes. 158 soccer players 101 of them are goal keepers. A 2015 Brown study tested 14 samples of crumb rubber. "In the 14 samples tested, 12 known carcinogens were found" (Foudy, 2015).
These findings really scared me. Will I get cancer from playing on these synthetic turf fields? Are my teammates and all of the athletes at my university at risk because of the field they play on? Hopefully not. Although I would advise anyone playing on these types of fields to keep from diving into the turf and ingesting the crumb rubber at all costs, or you may end up with something much worse than just turf burn.
Sources Cited
Foudy, J. (2015, November 24). Turf wars: How safe are the fields where we play?
Retrieved September 24, 2016, from http://www.espn.com/espnw/
news-commentary/article/14206717/how-safe-fields-where-play
