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 Playground gets more bounce.
"Ahhhhh-iieeeeeee!
Boing, boing, boing.
Gone are the days when soaring down a slide at the park led to smacking your bottom on a mound of impacted sand that awaited your fall.
Perma-Turf is here - ground cover made of recycled rubber tires cut up into bits and pieces of bouncy material. It's part of
the non-toxic, eco-smart children's park that opened last Sunday across from the baseball fields at the Woodlawn sports complex on Woodlawn Avenue.
Recreation director Howard "Tex" Gwynne had checked out similar environmentally safe
equipment at a children's park in Cherry Hill and "was sold on it right away." he said.
"It's the safety factor. If a kid falls from the top of a playground, he's not going to get hurt."
"I love this stuff," said Patty Pacitti, a mother of three boys. "We've been to several
playgrounds in other townships where they have wood chips or sand, which is just not as good. They might fall down or put it in their mouths."
Jerry, her 4-year-old son, couldn't have agreed more when he tripped into the turf, mouth wide open.
"Yechh," he said, as he spittout out bits of black. Not very tasty.
Perma-Turf, made in Delaware by the Tirec Corp., gives old tires that people otherwise have to pay to have hauled away a second chance at life.
"If you think about it, whoever came up with the idea came up with it at the right time,"
Tirec spokeswoman Jennifer Buchanan said. "We spent 60 years making tires indestructible for our cars, and making them bad for the landfills. Now it's saving children."
A 1994 study of playgrounds in 22 states by the Public Interest Research Groups and
Consumer Federation of America found that 75 percent of playground injuries are caused by falls, and that 92 percent of the playgrounds had inadequate protective surfaces.
The cushioning effect of six inches of Perma-Turf is comparable to 12 inches of mulch, a more traditional ground cover, Buchanan said.
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