2y ago

The plastic lawn backlash: why people are pulling up their fetid fake grass

Lockdown was boom time for artificial turf – but last year demand plummeted. The reason? Well, it retains the smell of dog urine, for a start …

9 comments

As with all plastics, all this fake grass will continue to be a problem even when it’s removed. We can either burn it or leave it in landfill to ever so slowly decompose into billions of bits of microplastic.
It should have been banned a long time ago, but we only ever address things when it's already too late.

There were people in another similar thread unironically saying they needed there fake grass because "muh dog shit and piss!". Ok maybe a burnt patch in the grass is unsightly, but so is fake grass, no one has ever said "wow, that fake grass looks as good as the real thing!" At least the soil can take away and break down the piss, where as it just sits on top of the astroturf. Disgusting.
- Imagine having to try and clean off a runny dog turd that is slowly sinking into your plastic lawn. You can blast it with a hose and turn it into a pool of dog shit slurry; if the lawn is on slope you can try to encourage it to slurp downhill.
- I wouldn't want my entire yard of the shit, but I did buy a section to put on my deck for my dog that was no longer able to walk up and down the stairs. I put some clamps on the hand rail so I could hang it and hose it off afterwards because it did stink bad if I didn't.

There are other issues which come with artificial lawns too:
A friend of mine has an artificial lawn and hot ash from her neighbours' barbeques has made holes in it.
And my nextdoor neighbours have a cheap artificial lawn that now has weeds growing through it.

I moved in to a house with plastic grass, it's only a tiny patch so to be honest I don't mind, it wouldn't be worth mowing. But I'd rather it was just a flowerbed or something. Why would you want a garden if you don't like nature!