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Child's Play Can Be Harmful to Their Health

I was one of the lucky kids in the Bronx, because our neighborhood playground was right down the street. My friends and I were there nearly every day, and we loved the place.

The playground had a few sad-looking trees but no grass to speak of, and it was surrounded by a chain-link fence. It had some very uncomfortable benches and the requisite equipment, like see-saws, slides (the metal kind that got really hot in the sun), monkey bars, and swings.

And everything we did there, we did over concrete. If you fell off something, you were on your own. If you didn't manage to slow down coming off the slide, that concrete did it for you. And if you took a dare while hanging upside down by your knees on the monkey bars and let go, as my sister did, you got a striking pair of black eyes, and the admiration of your friends. We went home scraped, burned, and black-and-blue most days.

Today, I look at the playgrounds our kids use, with their brightly colored plastic and wooden stuff to climb on and a cushy landing pad of mulch or rubber, and I think . . .

Boy, were we lucky.

Because in our well-intentioned attempts to protect our kids, we might actually have made things worse for them. I'm all for going green, but when we got rid of kid-unfriendly metal and concrete and put in fake turf and wooden play sets, we may have unintentionally opened the door to things much worse than bumps and scrapes.

You may be familiar with the well-publicized problem of treated wood. Since the 1940s, wood has been treated with a preservative called chromated copper arsenate (CCA), which contains arsenic, to control rot and insects, and the treated wood was used for decking, fences, and utility poles, among other things, including eventually playground equipment. When unsafe levels of arsenic were found to be leaching from the wood into the ground, the surrounding bodies of water, and even onto children's hands, the treated wood industry agreed to phase out CCA for residential applications, including playground equipment, at the end of 2003, although it was and still is approved for use in commercial applications.

The problem, though, is that many products made of the CCA-treated wood remain in use, because the agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency didn't apply to existing residential structures, and in fact there may still be millions of arsenic-treated play sets in backyards around the country. And if the toxic wood is disposed of, it's often taken to recycling facilities, where it's mixed with untreated wood and chipped up to make mulch.

In other words, the mulch you buy at the store or get for free from the county may actually contain arsenic-treated wood. And if you then spread the mulch around, say, your playground equipment, or your schoolyard, or your own backyard, your kids are back to playing in arsenic again. On the other hand, many studies have shown that the arsenic isn't really dangerous, even to kids. But as you'll probably guess if you've read my previous articles, the safety studies were likely to be financed by the treated wood industry.

A better option is buying play sets made of untreated, naturally rot- and insect-resistant hardwoods such as cedar or redwood (if you wish to overlook the environmental concerns in using such endangered trees), or choosing wood treated with ammoniacal copper quaternary (ACQ) or copper boron azole (CBA), which are widely reported to be less toxic. However, your best bet is the untreated wood: The Florida Center for Solid and Hazardous Waste Management has found that copper leaching from wood treated with ACQ or CBA can harm fish and other aquatic organisms, so it may not be as safe as the industry says it is.

Maybe you want to really play it safe, as well as do the "greenest" thing, so you choose plastic, especially recycled plastics. That should be okay, right?

Well, maybe not. Bisphenol A and phthalates are increasingly believed to migrate from plastics into other substances, including us, and their effects on the human body, particularly the young human body, can be dire. Numerous studies have shown that various plastics are found in the bodies of nearly all Americans, and many scientists believe that chemicals in some of those plastics may be linked to such conditions as asthma, obesity, and reproductive disorders, such as hormone disruptions and even sterility.

Maybe we should forget the play sets for now. How about a sandbox? Well, maybe not. A form of asbestos called tremolite has been found in some types of sand used in sandboxes, and other sands for the same use, and most sand, in fact, contain crystalline silica, which is an acknowledged carcinogen. For your children's safety, be sure any sandbox they play in contains playground-specific sand that has been washed to remove any inhalable particles. And it's worth remembering that sandboxes may be used at night by wilder creatures than our kids, so a tarp or other nighttime covering might be a good idea.

In fact, some parents might wish they could wrap up their children, too, especially as protection against pesticides. Aerial spraying can often go off-course, and even spraying by your municipality can leave toxic residues on grass, plants, and, right, playground equipment. I'm no fan of mosquitoes, but spraying for them willy-nilly by sending a truck down the street at night doesn't seem like the best way to deal with the problem, at least to me. I'm fortunate to have a very sensitive nose, and if I pick up even a hint of pesticide smell when I'm outdoors, I leave the area as quickly as possible, especially if I'm walking my dog.

At the heavily used park in St. Petersburg, where I take him daily, I'm also careful not to let him step where the herbicides have been sprayed, such as around trees and signposts. You'll know a spot has been treated because everything in it is dead, while around it, the grass looks green and healthy. I don't want toxic chemicals on my pet's feet, and I'm guessing you don't want them on your children's skin.

Which brings us to the tire crumbs. That's the common name for ground-up tires, also known as rubber mulch, and the stuff is very popular at playgrounds now. We think of it as simply recycling, making a playground green by turning it, unfortunately, black. But how safe is the rubber? Walk into a tire store and see what you notice first. I'm guessing it'll be the smell.

Here's a secret: When you smell something, it's because molecules of the substance have entered your nose and are traveling to your brain. When you smell something, you're literally internalizing it-that's what our sense of smell is. And when you smell tires, you are inhaling as many as 49 different chemicals, including volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and tire particulates, or itty-bitty pieces. And these chemicals emitted by tires are linked to cancers and reproductive disorders.

Your child may indeed have only limited exposure to the chemicals, and certainly the studies paid for by the recycled rubber industry say their product is safe. But these ground-up tires may contain latex, as well, which has been linked to asthma and latex allergies. Also, a study published in the July 2003 issue of the Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association found that runoff from tire crumbs is toxic to aquatic life for at least the first three months of use.

Recent news stories on concerns about the use of tire crumbs in playing areas have appeared in the Stamford, Connecticut Advocate and the New York Times. And reporters from News 12 Long Island took a sample of the stuff from a playing field in Port Washington for lab studies. The content levels of heavy metals were found to be within government limits, but some cancer-causing chemicals were well in excess of state safety levels. Chrysene, in particular, was present in amounts more than 1,250 times the safe limits. (A roundup of published material on the safety of tire crumbs is here: http://www.synturf.org/rubbercrumbtoxic.html)

For now, at least, the more you know about the potential for toxic child's play, the better off you, and your children, will be. It sounds strange to think of playing on concrete and hot metal as the good old days, but that may indeed be the case.

And it makes me think of something else from the good old days, a famous slogan: Better living through . . .

On second thought, never mind.