‘Forever Fields’: How Pennsylvania became a dumping ground for discarded artificial turf

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.