HOW GREEN IS YOUR FAKE LAWN?
Sales have grown like topsy during lockdown, but critics say they’re bad for the environment AND for wildlife. So which side of the fence are you on in gardening’s new turf war?
NICOLA DANIELS has spent — as many of us have during lockdown — a lot of time in her garden. The 32-year-old physiotherapist has two sons, Zac, aged seven and Finn, three. ‘We were enjoying the outdoor space, but the state of our lawn was driving me insane,’ she says. Nicola’s lawn, laid by the construction company of her new-build house, was planted on clay soil.
‘The kids wore the grass away. It became like a mudbath, the kids were constantly dirty. It just didn’t look very good.’ When her holiday in Dubai was cancelled, she and her husband decided to splash the cash on solving the problem: an artificial lawn.
In early May, a company called Lazylawn ripped up her scruffy turf, installed seven tonnes of stone base and then laid its ‘Wonder Yarn’ fake grass. In total the project to transform her 30ft x 30ft garden cost a little over €6,000. ‘Everybody who comes in can’t believe how good it looks. It is amazing. We’ve had a stripe put in it so it looks like Wembley,’ she laughs.
But she is not the only person to install an artificial lawn during lockdown. According to the biggest suppliers, business has been booming over the past couple of months.
‘It’s been absolutely massive,’ says Andy Driver, sales director at LazyLawn. ‘Our sales have probably gone up 300 per cent compared with last year.’
His commercial rival, Mel Wright at Wonderlawn, says sales have doubled: ‘It just went beserk in May.’
Another, Michael Williams at Forever Green Lawns, says: ‘It’s been crazy. We’re probably four times as busy as we would have been this time last year.’
Lockdown may have caused swathes of the economy to seize up. But not artificial lawns. They are spreading across Europe’s back gardens as ferociously as Japanese knotweed.
This latest spurt in sales comes after sales of artificial lawns really took off about ten years ago, when the quality and appearance of fake grass dramatically improved.
‘Prior to that it was very much short-pile stuff, which wasn’t very desirable, a bit scratchy and not very aesthetically pleasing,’ admits Driver.
THE trend for increasingly realistic-looking artificial lawns, incorporating brown and yellow blades, however, has emerged at the same time as another consumer trend: an awareness of the environmental damage caused by plastic. Could our fake lawns be destroying our insects and flora?
‘The only green thing about fake grass is its colour. I hate it,’ says Carol Klein, long-time co-presenter of BBC’s Gardeners’ World. ‘It is really awful ecologically. It’s just horrid.’
How bad are plastic lawns for the environment? Or are the fears expressed by professional gardeners driven more by snobbery than by genuine ecological concerns?
Fake grass has been around since the mid-1960s, when the Astrodome in Houston, Texas, installed a neongreen surface in its new indoor baseball stadium: ChemGrass. It soon was rebranded ‘AstroTurf’.
The hard-wearing nylon surface soon took off, especially for hockey pitches and tennis courts, but only entered consumers’ back gardens during the late 1990s, and mostly as a novelty.
The quality of fake grass slowly improved, however, and was given two significant seals of approval a decade ago. The first was when the Chelsea Flower Show, the jewel in the Royal Horticultural Society’s (RHS) crown, allowed artificial grass for the first time in 2010, when a brand called Easigrass was used in one of the gardens.
‘We were the black sheep of the gardening world,’ says Anthony Gallagher, managing director of Easigrass. ‘We were just so nervous about proving artificial grass has a role to play.
‘A lot of people have come to realise it’s a solution —– for shady city gardens, where you get a lot of traffic, especially if you have young children. A real lawn just can’t take the stick. It just doesn’t last.’
The second was when Wembley stadium re-laid its pitch in the same year, after complaints about it being a poor quality surface. It used a mixture of real grass and a small amount — three per cent — plastic grass, an increasingly common technique in professional football pitches.
If it’s good enough for David Beckham and Wayne Rooney — and beloved by celebrities incuding Denise Van Outen — it can’t be all that bad, can it?
Yes, it can, says Guy Barter, chief horticultural adviser to the RHS, which is the bible for many Irish gardeners to follow.
‘We did allow some in the past as a quirk, but we put our foot down,’ he says. ‘It’s not the message we want to send. We don’t have artificial grass any longer at our flower shows and we’ve removed it from our gardens.’
He agrees that many gardens, especially those on balconies or those owned by people in wheelchairs, cannot support a proper lawn. But he believes artificial lawns cause two particular problems.
‘Real grass absorbs dust and carbon dioxide and puts carbon in the soil. It supports wildlife. Artificial turf doesn’t do that.’
These concerns are echoed by Paul Hetherington, director at Buglife, the insect charity. ‘Artificial grass is bad for nature, it’s bad for wildlife. A lawn supports so many creatures. This plastic alternative supports no life forms whatsoever.’
How about in my garden? My lawn is mostly bare earth because of teenagers playing football on it.
‘Yes, because underneath your scrappy piece of ground, you’ll find all sorts of creatures such as earthworms. You’ll certainly find some leatherjackets, which are the larvae of what we call daddy long-legs.
You’ll probably have centipedes and beetles. That will mean birds will come down and eat on your lawn. There’s a whole ecosystem underneath there.’
The decline in urban butterflies and urban bees could be down, in part, to the rise of artificial lawns.
‘We know all insects are in decline at the moment; artificial lawns are one of many factors at play here,’ he says.
Manufacturers and owners of artificial lawns, however, say it’s too simplistic to claim they are an environmental disaster.
Mel Wright, director at Wonderlawn, says: ‘Remember, there is an environmental impact with natural grass. Natural grass does not look after itself. You have to use electricity or petrol to power your lawnmower, there’s the plastic in the lawn mower, trips back and forth to B&Q to buy weedkillers, you have to water it, weed it, to keep it in good condition.’
He claims that most people who lay fake grass end up using their garden far more. He insists people spend an extra €500 or so on planting trees and shrubs to look after once they have their new artificial lawn. ‘That adds much more to the environment for insects than their old lawn.’
Rob John installed an artificial lawn last year, mostly because he didn’t like the hassle of mowing his grass and it became boggy in winter.
He says: ‘My girlfriend and I are really into wildlife. We’ve planted loads around the perimeter, we have four bird feeders, and we try to make it as bee-friendly as possible with tons of lavender.’
Possibly a bigger worry than the loss of habitat for insects, however, is what you do with a fake lawn at the end of its life.
No authoritative figures exist for how many lawns are now artificial. But considering the boom has been running for 15 years or so, that means there are thousands of acres of artificial lawn that at some stage will have to be disposed of.
This is Carol Klein’s main issue with fake grass. ‘It is made from two types of plastics bonded together, so it can’t be recycled because they require different ways of recycling. Ironically, it will end up in landfill.’ Fake lawns are nearly always made up of polyethylene ‘blades’ of grass, and either a latex or a polyurethane backing to hold it all together. As with any complex material made up of more than one plastic, it is almost impossible to recycle.
Driver acknowledges these are legitimate concerns. ‘The lack of a recycling facility was threatening the industry,’ he says, but adds that a special artificial lawn recycling centre opened in the Netherlands at the start of this year.
‘I think for people to say “Oh, it’s plastic, it must be bad” is lazy. The industry has taken steps to recycle it.’
Wright says an increasing number of lawns are made with the blades and the backing using the same plastic, to help its recyclability.
Not everyone is convinced. ‘It’s smoke and mirrors,’ says Sian
Sutherland, campaigner at Plastic Planet, who believes the vast majority of lawns still end up in landfill. ‘Is anyone with a fake lawn going to bother shipping it to the Netherlands?’ She also has another worry: ‘There are massive concerns about how these plastic lawns are made. In the extrusion process (forcing the molten plastic out through its mould) in order to get that very fine blade of grass, the blades are often coated with chemicals that are endocrine disruptors. These compromise our immune system.’ Wright admits that some cheaper lawns, ‘are made to a budget, so they use lead in the manufacturing — it speeds up the extrusion process’. Low levels of cadmium, benzene, nickel, chromium and arsenic have also been found in sports pitches. These chemicals have been found in the so-called ‘rubber crumb’, often derived from ground up old car tyres, that is brushed into the artificial lawn to help weigh it down.Lawn manufacturers point out that back garden lawns do not use rubber crumb, they use sand.
The final worry about artificial lawns is another potential health risk: they can overheat in summer. A study by Loughborough University in 2016 found that its newly installed artificial sports pitch often reached temperatures of above 65c (149f) on days when the air temperature hit 25c during July — almost hot enough to fry an egg.
The study found the main culprit was a black rubber crumb, which is not used in high-quality lawns. Instead they use kiln-dried sand, which reduces most heat build up.
Professional gardeners, however, are still not convinced. Carol Klein argues why have a lawn at all? ‘After all, a lawn is quite an old-fashioned idea. I don’t have one.’
Joel Ashton, who appears on BBC
Springwatch and author of Wild Your Garden, says an increasing number of people are abandoning lawns in favour of planting a wildflower meadow.
‘Planting wildflower meadows are becoming far more common, certainly compared with 15 years ago,’ he says, ‘The beauty of a wildflower meadow is it takes so little maintenance and it’s so lovely to look at.’
For many, however, an artificial lawn’s convenience will win over encouraging beetles and worms.
As Nicola Daniels says: ‘To be honest, I’m not a fan of animals and creepy crawlies. And the environmental thing isn’t something I’d really considered. The guys who fitted it said it should last 20 years, so a lot further down the line, I’d hope there would be an environmentally friendly way of getting rid of it or reusing it.’
Let’s hope so, too — for the sake of the planet, as well as the bees and butterflies.