by Stephen Howie February 08, 2024 

It started when she ran into two of her former goalkeepers at University Village, an outdoor mall in northeast Seattle. The two young women had grown up playing soccer in the same Seattle neighborhoods, on the same fields. When Griffin saw them at University Village, they had another thing in common: Both were bald from undergoing chemotherapy treatment for lymphoma.

After working with goalkeepers for decades (and playing in goal for the U.S. Women’s National Team), Griffin recognizes certain personality traits particular to goalies. Being a goaltender, especially at a high level, requires relentless optimism in the face of inevitable heartache: You can make spectacular saves, but it’s the one mistake people remember.

That day at University Village, Griffin saw that goalie attitude — unrelenting optimism and a sense of common fate — in her two former players. They saw their diagnoses as an ironic twist that was related somehow to their role on the field. Typical goalkeepers, they said, shaking their heads and smiling.

But also, “Why us?”

“One of them said, ‘I wonder if it's the stuff in the field,” Griffin recalled. “I wonder if it’s those little black dots, because we're eating them, we get them in our eyes, we get them in our abrasions.”

Those little black dots are the crumb rubber used as infill on more than 13,000 playing and practice fields across the U.S. Each of those fields uses 20,000 to 40,000 shredded waste tires to provide cushioning and traction. While waste tires are heavily regulated because they contain known carcinogens and heavy metals, when those same tires are chopped up and put on playing fields, they are unregulated.

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BY PANDORA DEWAN ON 6/6/23 AT 8:00 AM EDT

The safety of recreational outdoor flooring is rarely discussed. But, according to scientists, your kids might be playing on a bed of toxic chemicals.

Environmental toxicologist Genoa Warner studies the impact of environmental chemicals on the human body at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. "My life collided with my research when my town decided to look into putting artificial turf on the playing fields in the park about a quarter of a mile away from my house, where I take my kids to play," Warner told Newsweek.

In August 2022, Warner and her colleague, Maire Murphy, published a paper in the Journal of Environmental Pollution summarizing the impacts of artificial turf on human health.

"I found it striking that very little health research has been done," Warner said. "We just have not widely studied the health impacts of installing artificial turf in communities and there needs to be more research.
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Read the full article from Newsweek here.