The U.S. Turf University
Educating the World on Synthetic Turf Products:
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Dangers of Recycled Tire Mulch
In a prior posting I vented about how a certain Central Florida gardening supa' star was highly recommending recycled tire mulch on-line (and I suspect in print too). This is the same well-respected gardener who has no problem utilizing synthetic fertilizers that feed the plant but not the soil...and send excess nitrogen or whatever else into our waterways...and keep big agri-business related companies with fat pockets...but I digress, that's a whole other series of postings.
I don't want to paraphrase this info because I just took a bunch of Benadryl and I am not trusting my literary or informational abilities too much at the moment. So...instead I will just shamelessly copy great info from the EHHI (Environmental and Human Health Inc.) site, they are a nonprofit organization that specializes in protecting us from ourselves.
A bit long but well worth the time investment. Here goes it (by the way, this also applies to using recycled tires to make raised beds, sorry):.
..The report is designed to place health and environmental exposures to recycled tire crumbs in a scientifically based context. In the spring of 2007, EHHI received numerous inquiries from parents who were concerned about health risks to their children from exposures to the ground-up rubber tire "crumbs" found in their town's synthetic turf fields. It was in response to those inquiries that research was undertaken.