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Synthetic turf can look just as real grass from a few feet away but does it hold water with its new eco claims?

Installing synthetic turf has become all the rage recently. It was even featured on some Bay Area local channels. Commonly known in the past as astro turf, it has been reinvented, repacked and now called ‘eco turf.’ It is being touted as the latest in green landscaping. There is even a striking list of ecological “solutions” that this product addresses. Those include no mowing, no watering or expensive irrigation systems, no weed control, and no other maintenance headaches like fertilizing and hauling away grass clippings.

The latest synthetic turf is even manufactured from recycled plastic and is recycable at the end of its life. Your kids can play on it in the rain and won’t get muddy. It is wheel chair accessible. So it seems like we have solved a horde of environmental issues with one product, so what’s not to love?

Stepford Lawns

Do you recall the part in the movie, The Stepford Wives where one of the Stepford wives gets stabbed and it messes with her wiring and she starts repeating “ I thought we were friends, I thought we were friends? That’s what I imagine synthetic turf is saying when I stab it with my accusations of it being a pseudo green product. Like my friend Owen Dell would say, it’s kind of like organic heroin, organic or not it is still fundamentally a bad idea.

Aromatherapy it’s not

I’ll begin with the deceptively simple argument that my primary distrust of synthetic turf is based on the fact that it is not alive. It does not breathe and therefore it offers no oxygen as a byproduct. On a warm day the entire area around a synthetic playing field reeks of melting off-gassing plastic, not an enjoyable smell. It certainly is not aromatherapy. Again because the stuff is not living and breathing the cooling effect is absent and thus the heat island affect is increased. The ‘heat island’ refers to the phenomena in which urban air and surfaces sustain higher temperatures than nearby rural areas.

The images below comparing air, water, bermudagrass, sand, asphalt, and synthetic turf surface temperatures illustrate how (more…)

Love and relationships are our biggest assets

Before you bought your home or rented an apartment, did you consider how green is your community?  Chances are you haven’t.  Most people don’t.  Not only majority of folks have no clue as to what a “sustainable” community really is but for years, there has not been much need for it.  Today, however, we’re much more aware of our carbon paw prints, wasteful lifestyles and the ever growing need to just simply connect with people around us.  Fact is, sustainability of the community is becoming a huge factor when choosing a place to plant our roots for the future. 

So what is a sustainable community?  After looking at many definitions, perhaps the UK Sustainable Communities Plan defines it best: “Sustainable communities are places where people want to live and work, now and in the future. They meet the diverse needs of existing and future residents, are sensitive to their environment, and contribute to a high quality of life. They are safe and inclusive, well planned, and offer equality of opportunity and good services for all.”  Ahhh… the English, they do get some things right, don’t they?  

So ideally, a true gage of sustainability is where the environment prospers along with the people who are living in it.  In order words, the housing developments must be incorporated in the natural environment already present on the ground and not the other way around which was much too common years ago.  

Such an idealistic concept as community living in harmony with the environment and local ecosystems may sound far fetched but its not.  In fact, one such example in Bay Area is (more…)

If you are an eco conscious parent there is no doubt your kid will be one too. The only challenge we may face as parents is finding an effective way to teach our children about the environment. There is a growing concern that the environmental information our children find on television or in schools is biased either by activists who scare children with “gloom and doom” stories or by companies who are trying to downplay the effects of pollution in our environment.

To the average parent, finding accurate, balanced environmental information for children can sometimes be quite a challenge. But why rely on schools or TV when we should do it ourselves in the first place?  There are plenty of simple ways that we can help our kids understand the significance of caring for the planet. The key is to inspire them without sounding preachy or overly militant.  Here are some things we can do to engage our kids and inspire them to become caring earthlings (more…)

Although we may be disciplined shoppers, able to go into any store and spend only a few minutes there, picking out what we need, purchasing it, and then leaving, the same is not always true with our children, is it?  In fact it probably never happens.

Children, much more than adults, are impacted by the commercials with which they are bombarded during every cartoon show or “kid-safe” show that they watch.  The advertisers are super skillful these days at getting deep into the psyche of our children and plant the seeds that eventually sprout into a compulsive, insatiable consumer. 

Understandably, kids also have a lot less discipline than adults. They see something, they want it now and it’s as simple as that.  They can go on whining about it till they get what they want.  And then of course there are parents, who compensate the lack of attention to their kids by buying them every possible toy on the planet.  “What’s that little Suzy, your Barbie version 2.1 is outdated?  Oh the new Barbie has a new hair cut style?  No problem here’s the latest Barbie, version 2.2.  Hope you’re happy for another 3 days.”  Meanwhile the old Barbie that we purchased last week is on its way to spend an eternity in (more…)