A serious question, how much worse is artificial turf compared to natural grass? Yes artificial is plastic and manufactured from oil etc. Once made how long does it last/ how do you maintain it/ how do you dispose of it? Is it that bad in certain situations (replacing a small city centre concreted courtyard/ a play area for kids etc)? Compare this to my grass. Now please don’t judge me and I guess many others will be similar to me but I use a petrol mower maybe weekly for 6/8 months of the year using maybe 20 litres of petrol, I bought a plastic fuel can, I service the mower with new oil each year, I use an electric scarifier once a year, add a weed/feed once or twice a year (how is this chemical made, delivered to the shops, does it harm the biome etc). Yes, I could never mow my lawn, get a push mower, never feed it etc, I know it would be greener. I am not sure just how much greener I am, say over the 10 year life span of artificial grass (if it is fit and forget.)
This touches on something that has long bothered me. How environmentally sound is gardening? We buy compost in large plastic bags, plant pots are mostly plastic, the industry that produces bedding plants etc. uses chemicals and is still permitted to use peat, most visits to garden centres are by car, and where do all our spring flowering bulbs come from? Are we any better than those who wish to have somewhere nice to sit and drink a beer and watch the kids playing football? I hate plastic lawns but it is one of those situations where, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone".
This is a really interesting point and can take you down a massive mental wormhole regarding the whole philosophy of gardening; why we do it, and how we do it.
I actively avoid garden centres and the commercial side of gardening as i believe that once you have a patch of land you can garden it essentially for free with a little patience and planning. This makes my job as a gardener much more difficult with instant gratification hard to come by as i have to wait often years for my well laid plans to come to fruition. I suspect it will be at least a decade before the borders and landscaping in my small garden are finally complete, but i'm ok with that. A by-product of this is very little negative environmental impact.
Who is worse, the 'gardener' who lays 20m2 of artificial turf, or the gardener who fills their borders with peat rich compost and hundreds of plastic wrapped annuals twice every year?
I go for a walk around our housing estate for about 45 minutes almost every day so made an effort to check out how many properties I could spot with artificial grass. I could only check front gardens but spotted a total of 3. Two have certainly been in existence for a few years, and both properties were occupied by elderly couples.
I get the "it's only a tiny fraction of the land arguement" but equally, and I assume the fact is still true, if everyone in the world had 2 acres of land then we would take up less space than Texas. It might seem like a pointless fact but it shows how much damage we as a population are doing to the world when we don't occupy large parts of it.
I think the fact that plastic faux grass is even available for sale gives the consumer the wrong message that it is somehow safe. Take the subject of microplastics force example, which can escape from our laundry via washing machines into the environment, and is a kind of 'indirect' pollution. Plastic grass, by its nature, is placed onto soil or ground and is rather more obvious I would have thought as a 'direct' pollutant - but the problem with plastics in general is that as long as they remain on sale with no warnings or caveats, people will continue to buy them in quantity.
I think a widespread education campaign and phasing out has to be the way forward.
Sorry to witness the demise of the forum. 😥😥😥😡😡😡I am Spartacus
Way out, @thevictorian. You’d have to go back about 3000 years for that statistic to be true. If you put today’s population of the world in Texas we’d each get a plot 10 yards x 10 yards. If everybody in the world had two acres it would be equivalent to a combination of USA, Canada, France, Germany and UK. … I think. I’m not confident when working with big numbers.
I assume a lot of people on here have pure wool carpets and good furniture, leather or wool with horsehair stuffing, but I’m pretty sure that is not the same for everyone, you can line your floors inside with plastic, carpets, laminate boards, Lino, furniture. Some people use plastic grass, terrible.
What about mowing/strimming grass, petrol, even worse batteries, all has to be disposed of, the patch of grass doesn’t support insects but there are plenty of places that do.
Gardening on the wild, windy west side of Dartmoor.
It's impossible to remove everything which has a negative effect on the environment. Even producing organic food requires a way of getting it to market.
I really don't like it either, but I did sympathise with the lady they featured. Her fundamental problem with the small grass lawn was that her kids played outside on it so much that it quickly turned it into a mud pit. The expert was asked for alternatives and she suggested things like a clover lawn which doesn't really address that problem.
So we were all left fuming about plastic lawns (and let's face it, they were mainly preaching to the choir.. it's a gardening programme) but no-one actually proposed a more environmentally friendly solution to this lady's problem.
Way out, @thevictorian. You’d have to go back about 3000 years for that statistic to be true. If you put today’s population of the world in Texas we’d each get a plot 10 yards x 10 yards. If everybody in the world had two acres it would be equivalent to a combination of USA, Canada, France, Germany and UK. … I think. I’m not confident when working with big numbers.
I see it is about 100 square meters per person for us to fit into Texas, after googling, so not a massive amount of space. The number I quoted was on an episode of QI, so surprised they got it so wrong (or possibly, miss remembering and i got it wrong).
The expert was asked for alternatives and she suggested things like a clover lawn which doesn't really address that problem.
So we were all left fuming about plastic lawns (and let's face it, they were mainly preaching to the choir.. it's a gardening programme) but no-one actually proposed a more environmentally friendly solution to this lady's problem.
Isn't that so often the way. Somebody explains a real life situation where real grass isn't practical because it turns to mud and the expert comes up with a 'solution' which would have exactly the same problems.
Posts
I actively avoid garden centres and the commercial side of gardening as i believe that once you have a patch of land you can garden it essentially for free with a little patience and planning. This makes my job as a gardener much more difficult with instant gratification hard to come by as i have to wait often years for my well laid plans to come to fruition. I suspect it will be at least a decade before the borders and landscaping in my small garden are finally complete, but i'm ok with that. A by-product of this is very little negative environmental impact.
Who is worse, the 'gardener' who lays 20m2 of artificial turf, or the gardener who fills their borders with peat rich compost and hundreds of plastic wrapped annuals twice every year?
I think a widespread education campaign and phasing out has to be the way forward.
… I think. I’m not confident when working with big numbers.
Some people use plastic grass, terrible.
So we were all left fuming about plastic lawns (and let's face it, they were mainly preaching to the choir.. it's a gardening programme) but no-one actually proposed a more environmentally friendly solution to this lady's problem.
I see it is about 100 square meters per person for us to fit into Texas, after googling, so not a massive amount of space. The number I quoted was on an episode of QI, so surprised they got it so wrong (or possibly, miss remembering and i got it wrong).