Plastic field doesn’t belong on the Island

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To the Editor:

This letter was originally sent to the Martha’s Vineyard Commission.

I hope that you and your families are all healthy, happy, and safe. I am writing to you today because our family is enormously concerned about the possibility of having plastic grass or chemical grass, a.k.a. artificial turf, on the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School fields. 

Just the knowledge that there are all those PFAS chemicals in plastic grass is bone-chilling and worrisome, and this does not include the toxic chemicals that will be used to clean the plastic and the pesticides and chemical weed killers that eliminate the plants that grow through it, according to articles that I have read. 

We have three grandsons in the high school at the moment who love and play sports. Our whole family is very anxious about this project; it goes against every environmental and ecologically conscious concept, and also everything that our beautiful Island of Martha’s Vineyard stands for. We are extremely concerned about the possibility of our grandsons playing on those toxic fields, and also every other MVRHS student who will be using the playing fields. There have also been studies that find that there are more injuries on artificial turf than on well-maintained grass fields. I played sports when I was in high school, and was thrilled to be out of the institutional school building, running, sitting on, touching, smelling, and feeling the live blades of grass under my feet. It was a very enriching, poignant, and healing experience that I hope will always be offered to our MVRHS students.

I hope that all this information I am including in this message and more is getting to the commission members and the public. The articles are very easy to access online. Please make sure you are choosing articles that are published by highly rated and trusted environmental organizations and medical experts.

Thank you all so much for your service to our community, and all that you do. We are confident that you have our Island students’ best interests and the interests of the health and well-being of our beautiful Island in mind.

Thank you so much for reading this letter.

 

Pam Stevens Benjamin
Vineyard Haven