At City’s Synthetic Fields, High Lead Levels Fuel Debate

Synthetic sports fields have become battlegrounds, with New York City’s parks and health departments on one side and some elected officials and activists on the other. One side says the turf is safe; the other says it harbors dangerous levels of lead and possibly other toxins.

On Sunday, members of New York City Park Advocates, a watchdog group, joined several elected officials and activists at Thomas Jefferson Park in East Harlem to highlight what they say are perils in the rubber pellets, or “tire crumbs,” used to construct the fields.

In December, the city shut down the park’s soccer field, which contains tire crumbs, after elevated lead levels were detected there. Geoffrey Croft, president of the park advocates group, said on Sunday that a lab report indicated that the field’s lead levels had been understated by the city, with some samples showing levels four times greater than the federal limits for playground soil. 

“These fields have a host of health and environmental problems, and are falling apart after only a few years,” Mr. Croft said.

The fields have become a place for old tires to go after they die — where shredded rubber and fake turf are used in lieu of soil and real grass. New York City is home to 95 such fields and playgrounds, which cost less to maintain and are better shock absorbers to bodies that hit them.

On Sunday, Mr. Croft was flanked by City Council members Eric N. Gioia and Melissa Mark-Viverito, the civil liberties lawyer Norman Siegel and other activists, all of whom urged a moratorium on the use of rubber crumbs in the city’s public sports fields until an environmental impact study of the pellets is done. They also questioned the use of artificial fields, given Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s push to make the city greener.
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