A new artificial turf playing field, the centerpiece of a $7.5 million upgrade of South Philadelphia’s Lawrence E. Murphy Recreation Center, is supposed to be free of PFAS, the chemicals that the EPA has linked to cancer, asthma, and a range of other health problems. Sprinturf, the turf’s manufacturer, told city officials that the surface didn’t contain the so-called forever chemicals, and provided a lab report to support its claim, a spokesperson for the city’s Rebuild program said earlier this week.
“Purely misleading testing that no reputable lab would do,” Graham Peaslee, a physicist at the University of Notre Dame, and a widely recognized expert on PFAS, wrote in an email to the newspaper. Peaslee — along with Kyla Bennett, a former EPA official who is now the director of science policy for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, and Jeff Gearhart, a research director at Ecology Center, an environmental nonprofit in Michigan — explained that RTI used a modified test that would normally be used to identify PFAS in water, even though turf is a solid.
