Comment on A quarter of Brits want a ban on fake grass
Very_Bad_Janet@kbin.social 1 year agoWhat's the environmental impact of fake grass? Isn't it better than real grass because it doesn't need water or pesticides? (I don't have a grass yard or lawn so I don't know what upkeep a fake one entails.)
You don’t have to put pesticides on your grass you know you can just leave it.
It gets watered by the rain, and the rain falls on it regardless of if it’s real or fake or concrete. So it isn’t a waste.
Anyway it allows for drainage. One of the reasons we get so much flooding nowadays is because we’ve concreted over everything.
Plastic grass supports little in the way of biodiversity and will constantly shed microplastics. Actual grass also allows the absorption of rain water into the ground below, whereas fake grass does not. This can contribute to localised flooding, and causes problems for replenishment of aquifers. All in all its awful stuff and the sooner it’s banned the better IMO.
A lawn needs neither of these things, or if you choose just to have plants instead (which we did in our small garden) then that needs neither water nor pesticides. Occasionally I might pull by hand some straggly stuff, or use a small electric strimmer to tidy things up (e.g. the garden path when stuff starts growing between the paving).
Unlike artificial grass, and even though my garden is small, this spring I had two birds nesting, I see quite a lot of bees and butterflies, and I just let the ants get on with doing their business. Pesticides and herbicides are never used. If there’s a plant I don’t want growing somewhere I can pull it up manually. There’s no need for the area to be super manicured.
thehatfox@lemmy.world 1 year ago
There are a lot of environmental impacts created by far grass. For a start, they create substantial damage to local biodiversity. Real grass is home to many kinds of insects and other animals, as is the the soil beneath it. Other animals such as birds rely on those insects for food. Fake grass is a habitat and food source for nothing, and damages the soil beneath it.
Healthy plant covered soil is also a natural carbon sink, so the mere existence of fake grass contributes to CO2 buildup. The production and installation of fake grass is also carbon intensive.
Fake grass eventually degrades and requires replacement, and despite manufacture claims, recycling it is difficult and often practically impossible. The degradation of fake grass is also a source of microplastic pollution, which can be carried on the air or leach into the soil, and eventually reach water sources.
That’s just a brief summary, there’s plenty of more comprehensive information available online. The stuff is quite frankly another disaster for the environment waiting to happen. A ban can’t come soon enough. There are plenty of better options for those that need an alternative to natural grass.
Very_Bad_Janet@kbin.social 1 year ago
This may be why my neighbors went with fake grass. They had the soil tested and it had a high percentage of lead. (They have a young child who was still crawling at that time.) They had to remove some of the top layer, IIRC, and put down some kind of protective membrane and then did fake grass on top. So this may depend on where you live. We have concrete in our backyard and bought playfalls (padded tiles that you sometimes see in playgrounds) to place under our playset. Luckily we did not have to deal with lead.
ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk 1 year ago
I went with a gravelly garden instead of fake grass because the occupant of the house had a grass allergy. Why pretend and fill the garden with nasty plastic.