Artificial turf is taking root on schoolyards, and even some skeptics are now ready-to-roll

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Grass holds a special place in the imagery of education. Picture a schoolyard or a university campus, and it’s likely that mental snapshot includes a lush, well-kept, green lawn. The grass is a canvas for the games of childhood, a place where kids can run and play.

Today, there’s a growing chance the orderly green space in the schoolyard is not grass, but artificial turf.

A little more than a decade ago, Richard Christie, the senior manager responsible for sustainability at the Toronto District School Board, was asked to look into artificial turf. He assumed he’d be against the idea.

The handful of turf fields already built at local schools at that point were perceived by administrators as a costly luxury pushed by wealthy parents. And from an environmental perspective, replacing natural grass with a plastic carpet, no matter how grass-like, just seemed like a bad idea.

But his view soon changed.

The board was spending a lot on maintenance at the 30 or so schools where grass never seemed to grow, he recalled. Barren fields would get fresh sod and be fenced off and unusable for months. Once the fences came down, the fields would be bald again in no time.

“We kept going back to the same 30 to 40 schools,” Mr. Christie said. “It made no sense.”

He decided that artificial turf, despite the environmental drawbacks and upfront cost, could be part of the solution. Once installed, the new artificial turf fields attracted a huge amount of use, inside and outside school hours.

“The big complaint about young people is that they’re on screens all the time, right? They’re not getting adequate physical activity,” Mr. Christie said. “This enables the teachers to take the kids out all the time.”

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Even some parents who had been skeptical about a plastic playing field were won over, he said. The fields became a gathering point for the community.

“That was the eureka moment,” he said. “The term I use is social infrastructure. It’s just massively beneficial from a social infrastructure point of view.”

A little less than 10 per cent of the nearly 600 elementary and high schools in the TDSB, Canada’s largest school board, now have turf fields, according to Mr. Christie. They’re also increasingly common in other school divisions and as municipal playing fields, boosted by their popularity for soccer, the country’s largest participation sport.

Turf fields across the country, whether run by schools, municipalities or private operators, are often full to capacity, booked from early morning to late at night for organized play.

Unlike grass, which suffers with the weather or as seasons change in early spring or late fall, turf is almost always playable. It also has a consistency of ball roll prized in games like soccer, which makes it popular with young players frustrated by long grass and dry, bumpy pitches common in Canadian climes.

Johnny Misley, chief executive officer of Ontario Soccer, said the sport is growing rapidly and has a pressing need for new facilities. He said there are only about 25 indoor artificial turf fields in the province, a few hundred outdoor turf fields and thousands of grass fields.

Turf fields cost more to rent, but clubs appreciate the longer season they afford and the consistency of the playing surface, Mr. Misley said.

“The quality of the pitch on turf doesn’t change. Of course, you pay extra for the luxury,” he said.

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But plastic pitches have downsides that have engaged fierce opposition. They’re costly to install, roughly $500,000 for an elementary-sized field and perhaps $2-million for a secondary school. They get very hot, sometimes twice as hot as grass. They can pose a higher injury risk for some athletes, and after about 12 years of use the old carpet usually just ends up in a landfill.

The story of artificial turf is usually traced to the construction of the Houston Astrodome in the mid-1960s, a venue for pro sport. It didn’t make real inroads as a playing surface for amateurs until the 2000s, but was met with skepticism as athletes worried about higher injury risk and the risk of exposure to chemicals in the turf and its infill, which can be made of crumb rubber or other materials. (At TDSB fields they use coated sand.)

Opinion on the subject is divided. Experts tend to weigh whether the benefits of increased physical activity outweigh the potential risks associated with possible chemical exposures from the pitch materials.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota surveyed the public on their preferences and most prefer to use natural grass in most cases, with the exception of those interested in playing organized sports, where there was no significant difference.

At the University of Guelph’s Turfgrass Institute, researchers study the characteristics of field surfaces.

Professor Eric Lyons said turf fields have some advantages in the Canadian context, but in his view grass is still far preferable. It’s cheaper up front, and it’s better for the environment, he said. But it takes expertise and work to do it well, Prof. Lyons said.

For a soccer field in particular, grass should be short, and usually that means mowing at least once or often twice a week. Most municipal mowing regimes favour cutting the grass every 10 days, Prof. Lyons said.

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But pledging proper maintenance and irrigation of an existing grass field isn’t as eye-catching for civic leaders as touting the construction of a new artificial turf field, Prof. Lyons suggested.

“It’s not a shiny new thing you can hang your hat on,” Prof. Lyons said. Even at his own university, the use of artificial turf pitches has expanded in recent years.

The TDSB retains a strong preference for grass, but when it’s impossible to grow real grass, turf is a viable option, Mr. Christie said.

A turning point for the TDSB, Mr. Christie said, was when they hired a “grass guy,” a former Turfgrass Institute student named Brian Bennett. His expertise has made growing grass possible in more schools where it had proved difficult in the past, Mr. Christie said.

If he were given unlimited funds, Mr. Christie said his preference would only be to add one or two turf fields a year over the next five years.

“I don’t think we want to go crazy on artificial turf,” he said.