Fri, November 15, 2019  •  6:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Address will be provided after registration:
Private Home  •  3 miles outside of the Beltway  •  Potomac, MD 20854

Space at this cocktail party and discussion is limited, so please register. Address will provided after registration.

6-8 PM: Mix and Mingle

Welcome / Introducing the Issue Diana Conway, President Safe Healthy Playing Fields Inc.

PEER and Artificial Turf Tim Whitehouse, Executive Director, PEER

What We have Found on Artificial Turf Kyla Bennett, PhD, Director of Science Policy, PEER

Observations Kathy Michels, PhD

Questions and Discussion

A recent PEER investigation conducted with The Ecology Center has found alarming toxic chemicals in the artificial turf blades and in the turf backing, raising new public health and environmental concerns, including the potential that these chemicals leach from turf fields into nearby waters. The chemicals discovered in the turf blades belong to a class on chemicals called PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” because they do not break down in the environment and bio-accumulate in the food chain. Human exposure to PFAS is associated with cancer, birth defects, and other troubling impairments.

Currently, there are at least 13,000 synthetic turf sports fields in the U.S., with more than a thousand new installations each year, producing industry revenue of an estimated $2.5 billion annually in the US alone. Many groups, including PEER, have raised concerns for years about the health effects of artificial turf. These surfaces are typically made of a plastic synthetic grass-like layer sitting atop several feet of gravel, and covered with about 40,000 shredded waste tires per standard sized field. Under active use like running and, sliding the tire crumb breaks down into smaller particles of tire crumb. As a result athletes face constant, sometimes daily exposure through inhalation, ingestion and dermal uptake. The tire particles also lodge in athletes’ shoes, clothing, hair, nose, eyes and ears.

Used waste tires are also ubiquitous in playgrounds for our very youngest children who engage in hand-to-mouth behavior, putting them at very high risk of direct ingestion, in addition to inhalation and dermal uptake. The result is that our children are exposed, from very early years through college or beyond, to everything shredded tires and plastic grass fields have to offer such as the newly documented PFAS, in addition to the known toxicity from lead, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, mercury and a number of dangerous hydrocarbons. This exposure is occurring in unstudied combinations over time and often in high heat, with close and frequent contact, at taxpayer expense and without disclosure or consent of the public.