QUESTION FAKE GRASS in LGUSD.

To conserve water costs, should we rob kids of equitable access to nature?   Certainly given increasingly-dense urban housing in Los Gatos, not every child's family is afforded their own private land from which to benefit from daily exposure to nature.   As a community working together to share natural resources, is THE place to severely restrict water the shared field? A field that may serve as the only regular daily exposure to nature that hundreds of our kids in dense, urban developments get? No. This is wrong. This constitutes an equity issue. LGUSD Equity Action Team and the many other Los Gatos community members that value equity, it's time to be an upstander for those children with less privilege. A tweet from LGUSD's superintendent about the district's commitment to equity. Elementary school play fields and public parks are absolutely the outdoor green spaces that make sense to judiciously water. In fact, this could very well be part of the rationale San Jos...

The Heat Island Effect. Source: Dustin Phillips on Flickr. Image featured in  "No More Pavement! The Problem of Impervious Surfaces" by Columbia Climate School Indeed one motive often cited for artificial turf usage is water conservation.  T he LGUSD slides from the 11/8/21 Town Hall meeting highlighted water conservation as a prime justification for covering school grounds with giant sheets of plastic. However, using water conservation to justify plastic grass is an argument sorely lacking in perspective. And it contributes to the false dichotomy that is this narrow set of district options being discussed. To conserve water, should we entirely sacrifice: two of the few remaining swaths of easily-accessible, publicly available living landscapes in our increasingly urbanized downtown?   the exposure to nature they provide 1000+ Los Gatos children twice every schoolday? the cooling they provide to counter the heat-island effect of our urban environment?  the biodi...

Image from  Safe Healthy Playing Field 's  Facebook post . Marketing artificial turf as "recyclable" is greenwashing. Being "recyclable" and being "recycled" are not the same thing.  Artificial turf is classified as a single-use plastic .   While some single-use plastic water bottles may be recycled, artificial turf is  NOT being recycled in the U.S. It's challenging to separate the infill and contaminants from the carpet. There are no facilities in the U.S. that recycle artificial turf, and it's unlikely we're shipping it overseas.  Industry confirms in the video below that no artificial turf has EVER been recycled in the U.S.: 🟢👀🟢We spy something green...an industry greenwashing tactic! 🚩Artificial turf has long been touted as being recycled, giving communities a false sense of being good enviro stewards. 💀BUT @TenCateGrassUS admitted that NO artificial turf has EVER been recycled in the US. NONE. pic.twitter.com/Q8RTjoxEwZ — PFA...

Image from Sierra Club's "Outdoors for All" Campaign The Sierra Club Loma Prieta's  first letter to the LGUSD school board  implores them to choose an alternative to plastic grass.  The letter: implores the district to leave fossil fuels in the ground,  draws attention to the 11 student athletes that have recently died from heat stroke, points to PFAS in the human body as sufficient reason alone to reject artificial turf entirely, deems artificial turf a poor investment for its short-lived purpose citing the extreme problem that is microplastic pollution, highlights social justice and equity impacts covering playgrounds with plastic. An excerpt from  Sierra Club Loma Prieta' s   second letter to the LGUSD school board :  "Artificial turf should never be used because it is toxic to watersheds. Microplastics bioaccumulate eventually into food and access the bloodstream through the respiratory system and/or the gastrointestinal tr...