We frequently cover the use of artificial turf in professional and amenity sporting applications on this newsletter, but an area not mentioned so much is its use in landscaping and private gardening.
I recently visited South California and walking around residential neighbourhoods there, one of the first things which struck me was that almost every home had a beautiful, bright green, well manicured lawn out front. On second glance however, it was plain to see that this lush carpet of green was precisely that - an artificial carpet.
Most everywhere you might find landscaped areas, outside stores, hotels, businesses etc, you saw this fake turf put down in place of natural grass.
Now of course this is mostly due to the State of California having been officially classed as suffering from drought conditions for around the last four years.
At the GIE-EXPO trade exhibition in Louisville, Kentucky, last October, I met Kris Kiser head of the OPEI which is the U.S outdoor powered machinery's trade association. He spoke to me about a phenomenon in the States which they as an organisation were hoping to prevent spreading from California into the rest of the country, which he termed 'the demonisation of the lawn'.
Basically he was referring to rhetoric which was emanating from the Governor of California's office, which was encouraging homeowners to rip up their evil, 'water guzzling' lawn and replace it with something less 'damaging' instead such as fake grass, decking or asphalt.
This seemed to me at the time as a very specifically Californian issue. Kris was concerned but didn't really think it had taken hold in other parts of the country yet, and I certainly didn't think we'd see similar over here. We love our garden stripes too much, everyone knows that!
Well a very interesting
article in The Guardian recently gave me pause for thought. The excellent piece by Sandra Laville talks of a 'growing trend' to lay artificial in favour of real grass. She quotes Eamon Sheridan, managing director of Artificial Grass London, who says there has been an increase in demand for it across the board this year. “
We have seen a 63% increase in sales in our case," he is quoted in the piece,
"but we are part of a group of companies, one of which, Artificial Grass Direct, has been established a lot longer, and so far they have seen a 220% increase in sales this year on last year.”
Obviously I don't know what his starting point was, but a 220% increase certainly sounds like a lot!
The point of Sandra's article is to point out the environmental impact of a proliferation of artificial grassed areas. Conservationists are warning that wildlife will suffer with a lack of habitats and huge amounts of waste are being created which are non-biodegradable.
From the standpoint of artificial turf being used for landscaping purposes over here, I guess it's a slightly different argument than for its use in professional sports. In sports we're hearing more and more instances of clubs struggling financially who see artificial pitches as a means of avoiding less game cancellations due to weather. But homeowners choosing to put down fake grass in their gardens could seem, to an advocate of natural turf, to simply smack of laziness. Even though it's been hot lately we certainly can't blame drought conditions for its popularity!
So what can turf professionals do to help the cause? I guess just carry on being superb ambassadors for natural turf. Your specialist knowledge and expertise should enthuse the public both by your words and by the evidence of your actions. Your perfectly maintained pitches and courses should speak for themselves on natural turf's environmental benefits, its value to personal health and wellbeing, and simply to its unbeatable aesthetics.
