GoKawiilThe new pitch is one part of a $70 million plan to build more recreational space at the university. As of this spring, Cornell plans to install something like a quarter million square feet of synthetic grass—what people have colloquially called “astroturf” since the middle of the last century. University PR says it will be an important part of a “health-promoting campus” that is “supportive of holistic individual, social, and ecological well-being.” Koizumi runs an anti-plastic environmental group called Zero Waste Ithaca, which says that’s mostly nonsense.
This fight is more than just the usual town-versus-gown tension. Synthetic turf used to be the stuff of professional sports arenas and maybe a suburban yard or two; today communities across the United States are debating whether to lay it down on playgrounds, parks, and dog runs. Proponents say it’s cheaper and hardier than grass, requiring less water, fertilizer, and maintenance—and that it offers a uniform surface for more hours and more days of the year than grass fields, a competitive advantage for athletes and schools hoping for a more robust athletic program.
But while new generations of synthetic turf look and feel better than that mid-century stuff, it’s still just plastic. Some evidence suggests it sheds bits that endanger users and the environment, and that it contains PFAS “forever chemicals”—per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, which are linked to a host of health issues. The padding within the plastic grass is usually made from shredded tires, which might also pose health risks. And plastic fields need to be replaced about once a decade, creating lots of waste.
Yet people are buying a lot of the stuff. In 2001, Americans installed just over 7 million square meters of synthetic turf, just shy of 11,000 metric tons. By 2024, that number was 79 million square meters—enough to carpet all of Manhattan and then some, almost 120,000 metric tons. Synthetic turf covers 20,000 athletic fields and tens of thousands of parks, playgrounds, and backyards. And the US is just 20% of the global market.
Where real estate is limited and demand for athletic facilities is high, artificial turf is tempting. “It all comes down to land and demand.” Frank Rossi, professor of turf science, Cornell
Those increases worry folks who study microplastics and environmental pollution. Any actual risk is hard to parse; the plastic-making industry insists that synthetic fields are safe if properly installed, but lots of researchers think that isn’t so. “They’re very expensive, they contain toxic chemicals, and they put kids at unnecessary risk,” says Philip Landrigan, a Boston College epidemiologist who has studied environmental toxins like lead and microplastics.
But at Cornell, where real estate is limited and demand for athletic facilities is high, synthetic turf was a tempting option. As Frank Rossi, a professor of turf science at Cornell, told me: “It all comes down to land and demand.”
In 1965, Houston’s new, domed baseball stadium was an icon of space-age design. But the Astrodome had a problem: the sun. Deep in the heart of Texas, it shined brightly through the Astrodome’s skylights—so much so that players kept missing fly balls. So the club painted over the skylights. Denied sunlight, the grass in the outfield withered and died.
A replacement was already in the works. In the late 1950s a Ford Foundation–funded educational laboratory determined that a soft, grasslike surface material would give city kids more places to play outside and had prevailed upon the Monsanto corporation to invent one. The result was clipped blades of nylon stuck to a rubber base, which the company called ChemGrass. Down it went into Houston’s outfield, where it got a new, buzzier name: AstroTurf.