QUESTION FAKE GRASS in LGUSD.

PFAS are used in artificial turf manufacturing. They have been found in the blades and backing of fields in use , most later landfilled. So from site of manufacture to site of use to site of disposal, artificial turf potentially contributes to PFAS in people, environments, animals and water. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency , PFAS have been linked to: developmental delays in children, accelerated puberty, hormone interference, decreased fertility, reduced immune systems, including reduced vaccine response, increased risk of prostate/testicular cancers, high cholesterol, etc. The conclusion of the “ PFAS Strategic Roadmap: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Commitments to Action 2021-2024 ” includes a directive to local governments to exercise increased and sustained leadership to prevent new PFAS contamination. Call upon your local governments to fulfill this EPA directive they’ve been tasked with. Call upon them to landscape schools and parks witho

1700+ Los Gatos children currently get to passively and actively recreate on nature for two recess periods per schoolday on LGUSD's elementary schools play fields.  More than half these children may be about to lose this privilege . San Jose Water's latest Water Shortage Contingency Plan (a document titled "Schedule No. 14.1 Water Shortage Contingency Plan with Staged Mandatory Reductions and Drought Surcharges") has 5 stages of water conservation that include mandatory restrictions regarding water use. Failure to comply with the restrictions of a given stage is deemed a wasteful and unreasonable use of water. The 5 stages are: Conservation and outreach Water reduction needed Severe water reduction (<--- This is where Los Gatos is as of 12/5/21.) Critical water reduction Emergency water reduction Even at the highest stage of water conservation, "Emergency water reduction" (stage 5), when San Jose Water prohibits water or irrigation of lawn, landscap

To conserve water costs, should we rob kids of equitable access to nature?   Certainly given increasingly-dense urban housing in Los Gatos, not every child's family is afforded their own private land from which to benefit from daily exposure to nature.   As a community working together to share natural resources, is THE place to severely restrict water the shared field? A field that may serve as the only regular daily exposure to nature that hundreds of our kids in dense, urban developments get? No. This is wrong. This constitutes an equity issue. LGUSD Equity Action Team and the many other Los Gatos community members that value equity, it's time to be an upstander for those children with less privilege. A tweet from LGUSD's superintendent about the district's commitment to equity. Elementary school play fields and public parks are absolutely the outdoor green spaces that make sense to judiciously water. In fact, this could very well be part of the rationale San Jos

The Story of Stuff  explains "Externalized Costs" in the video below. As apparent from the financials in the district presentation, artificial turf will cost the district at least a million dollars more than natural grass. While that's already a jaw-dropping amount of money, it does not even reflect the full true costs of artificial turf products. This often goes unacknowledged because true costs are not reflected on financial expense records. There are costs to artificial turf that neither the district nor the community will pay with cash from their pockets. These are called "externalized costs". These costs include the costs to environmental and public health and extend beyond LGUSD campuses. These costs are incurred and effect real people along the entire length of this product's lifecycle, from the toxic pollution that comes from harvesting of natural resources, through manufacture, through degradation over years of exposure to the elements and foot

The Heat Island Effect. Source: Dustin Phillips on Flickr. Image featured in  "No More Pavement! The Problem of Impervious Surfaces" by Columbia Climate School Indeed one motive often cited for artificial turf usage is water conservation.  T he LGUSD slides from the 11/8/21 Town Hall meeting highlighted water conservation as a prime justification for covering school grounds with giant sheets of plastic. However, using water conservation to justify plastic grass is an argument sorely lacking in perspective. And it contributes to the false dichotomy that is this narrow set of district options being discussed. To conserve water, should we entirely sacrifice: two of the few remaining swaths of easily-accessible, publicly available living landscapes in our increasingly urbanized downtown?   the exposure to nature they provide 1000+ Los Gatos children twice every schoolday? the cooling they provide to counter the heat-island effect of our urban environment?  the biodiversity t

Image from  Safe Healthy Playing Field 's  Facebook post . Marketing artificial turf as "recyclable" is greenwashing. Being "recyclable" and being "recycled" are not the same thing.  Artificial turf is classified as a single-use plastic .   While some single-use plastic water bottles may be recycled, artificial turf is  NOT being recycled in the U.S. It's challenging to separate the infill and contaminants from the carpet. There are no facilities in the U.S. that recycle artificial turf, and it's unlikely we're shipping it overseas.  Industry confirms in the video below that no artificial turf has EVER been recycled in the U.S.: 🟢👀🟢We spy something green...an industry greenwashing tactic! 🚩Artificial turf has long been touted as being recycled, giving communities a false sense of being good enviro stewards. 💀BUT @TenCateGrassUS admitted that NO artificial turf has EVER been recycled in the US. NONE. pic.twitter.com/Q8RTjoxEwZ — PFA

Image from Sierra Club's "Outdoors for All" Campaign The Sierra Club Loma Prieta's  first letter to the LGUSD school board  implores them to choose an alternative to plastic grass.  The letter: implores the district to leave fossil fuels in the ground,  draws attention to the 11 student athletes that have recently died from heat stroke, points to PFAS in the human body as sufficient reason alone to reject artificial turf entirely, deems artificial turf a poor investment for its short-lived purpose citing the extreme problem that is microplastic pollution, highlights social justice and equity impacts covering playgrounds with plastic. An excerpt from  Sierra Club Loma Prieta' s   second letter to the LGUSD school board :  "Artificial turf should never be used because it is toxic to watersheds. Microplastics bioaccumulate eventually into food and access the bloodstream through the respiratory system and/or the gastrointestinal tract. The precautionary principle

Image from report by EWG.org " PFAS Contamination of Drinking Water Far More Prevalent Than Previously Reported " Wind and rain blow or wash pollutants off hard surfaces like streets, parking lots, sidewalks, and artificial turf systems into storm drains that flow untreated directly into our creeks and waterways. In LGUSD's proposed artificial turf "fields", water will rinse the chemicals off the weathered and worn plastic blades of "grass" as well as off the perforated carpet backing and perforated shockpad beneath. The chemicals will be rinsed into drainage pipes that flow directly to storm drains . Why wouldn't PFAS forever chemicals, lead, infill, plastic grass blades, microplastics, cleaning chemicals, and weedkillers be carried by rainwater and sprinkler runoff from local artificial turf systems into the surrounding storm drains that flow into Los Gatos Creek? Even David Teter acknowledged at our Town Hall meeting the greater volume