Danish company Re-Match secured state incentives to open a recycling plant in 2022. It hasn't happened yet. Meanwhile, thousands of rolls of the fake grass, containing PFAS, are piled up on farms.

by Barbara Laker and David Gambacorta
Published Dec. 13, 2023, 6:00 a.m. ET

​Money doesn’t come easily to farmland owners in the tranquil, rolling hills of Pennsylvania. So at first, Jim Halkias thought he’d hit the jackpot.

A real estate broker had approached him in late 2018, and explained that a Denmark-based recycling company called Re-Match wanted to pay $4,500 a month to store more than 1,000 rolls of used, deteriorating artificial turf on 45 acres that Halkias owns in Grantville, Dauphin County.

Halkias was told that Re-Match intended to one day recycle the old turf. The company didn’t yet have a recycling facility in the United States, but the offer was enticing.
“It seemed,” he said, “like a great deal.”

The deal soon soured.

Halkias claims that Re-Match stopped paying him after two years, but left hulking rows of turf, stacked 10 feet high, at the edge of a cornfield, near a farmhouse and visible from the road. Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) received a complaint about the unsightly stacks, and inspected Halkias’ land.

The agency categorized the old turf as “solid waste” that constituted a “public nuisance,” and further determined that Re-Match had violated state environmental laws by failing to obtain necessary permits for storing the turf.

For years, Halkias has tried to sell his farm. He says three potential buyers lost interest because of the rolls of turf. “No one will accept the property,” he said, “with all this stuff, which is considered to be waste by the DEP.”

There is no government agency that monitors or regulates the disposal of artificial turf, which contains toxic chemicals, including PFAS, or per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as forever chemicals because they don’t break down in the environment and stay in the human body for years.

Read the investigation.

Alexa Jurado
Wed, December 13, 2023 at 5:30 AM EST

​A Midland school district is suing two companies after it paid a premium rate for a product that the district says failed to keep athletic fields cool as promised.

Richland 2 contracted with Geosurfaces Southeast, a sports surfacing company, in February 2020 and gave it over $3.7 million for synthetic turf installation at four high schools: Blythewood, Spring Valley, Westwood and Richland Northeast.

A lawsuit filed Oct. 4 accuses the company, along with synthetic turf brand TCoolPT, of fraud, negligence and breach of contract.

Geosurfaces promised the school district “good and workmanlike” construction services, supplies and products for the project, including an infill material called TCool, for which Richland 2 paid a “premium price” — hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to the lawsuit.

The company promised the school district that using TCool would keep the athletic fields 35 to 50 degrees cooler than standard infill products. It also promised that TCool would save Richland 2 additional costs, because the school district would not need to install irrigation systems.

This wasn’t the case, according to the lawsuit.

Instead, the school district found that the synthetic turf fields installed at the four high schools become ”extremely hot.” The lawsuit alleges that the TCool infill product was a “complete failure.”

The school district said it obtained independent testing of the infill product, and determined it was no different than regular infill used at other locations. It either didn’t work, or was never installed.

“None of these conclusions (are) acceptable,” the lawsuit reads.

​Read the full story.