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Considering Poured-In-Place, Mats & Tiles for Playgrounds?
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Poured In Place, Mats & Tiles are NOT Safe for Playground Falls! 
If you are truly considering poured in place, mats or tiles, you owe it to the kids who will be playing on this playground at least a few moments of your time to become educated about the realities about playground safety, specifically fall height safety. Most people, including a number of school districts and even governmental agencies, are unaware of the numerous problems with the monolithic surfaces often referred to as "Poured-In-Place" safety surfacing, along with most mats and tiles, which in most cases are not safe at all for real-life fall-height protection. You May Want to Look Into Our Safest (& Cheaper) Alternative! Here's the truth about ANY monolithic playground surface. The sole method of providing fall height attenutation is through compression alone, and the material returns to its original position after impact. Most children tend to fall at an angle, twisting as they fall. Whatever part of the body that comes in contact with the poured in place, mat or tile will tend to get twisted against the direction it's traveling on impact. This is NOT a good combination, and only the proverbial "tip of the iceberg" when it comes to poured in place, and most mats or tiles. The problems with Poured In Place (PIP), mats and tiles are numerous, some of which are covered on our Benefits page. Below are a some of the most identifiable issues:
Salmonella, Streptococcus & Staphylococcus? This is a sample of just a few of the many strains of harmful and contagious diseases that virtually every PIP surface tested in North America has been found to contain. Just imagine, if it's pathogenic it passes through skin on contact, within a nano-second, without warning. All it takes is compression by a little knee, elbow or hand, and then there's contact with a child's skin. These can also be present within a lot of tiles or mats, which tend to be more permanently mounted to avoid being tampered with or being removed from a play area. Binders & Materials are Affected by UV, Water & Other Elements Think about it... these materials are usually exposed to sunlight, rainwater and air, which tend to deteriorate and affect the elasticity of the corresponding safety layer(s) and/or surface, day-in and day-out. This has an influence on how the material responds in a fall. Usually and unfortunately, these all tend to harden over a relatively short amount of time, providing even less levels of safety than when they were installed! The bottom line is that PIP, play mats and tiles are safety surfaces which are not really safe for the fall heights of play equipment they are usually installed around. SoftStuff Provides the Best Fall Safety Anywhere! Our PermaLife SoftStuff, which is from Assiniboia Rubber Recycling, is unique in the industry. It's the ONLY playground surfacing whose safety EXCEEDS the testing capacity of the North American testing lab for ASTM F1292-09 (playground fall height attenuation). In fact, we're the ONLY company to provide you the COMPLETE test data online. We don't just tell you it's safe, our independent test data PROVES it! Check out page 4 of our 6-inch test report, available in PDF format for download on our Test Data page. Who Wants a Child to Go Through Major Surgery? The primary problem with injuries sustained by children falling upon PIP, playground mats or tiles is that they often result in what are called "long-bone radial" or "spiral" fractures, which run up the length of the arm or leg bone. These aren't your average fracture, where you visit the doctor's office, he sets the bone in a few minutes, and the limb is placed in a cast for about 6-8 weeks. The difference with long-bone radial/spiral fractures is that these require major surgery, involving rods & pins, often tendon damage, and lengthy physical therapy & rehabilitation. Even after all of this, such surgery could end up affecting the use of the injured limb during critical growth & development, so that the affected arm or leg might not ever be able to be used as effectively as it once was. Child Abuse Investigation Required? As if the injury and resulting surgery from a long-bone radial or spiral fracture wasn't traumatic enough, social service agencies across North America have identified these types of fractures as the #1 indication of child abuse. Pretty much every hospital, surgeon and emergency room doctor has been asked to report these types of injuries to social service agencies for investigation. Imagine this, some well-intentioned person may have called social services because they thought a child might have been in danger, but it ended up not being any serious issue, perhaps just innocent playing. However, if social services is now called out on a case such as this, with a prior visit on file, some immediately remove the child from that household as a safety measure... at least until it can be determined that it is a safe environment. So, on top of suffering this terrible injury, going through surgery, the child could be removed from their home? Not a good situation. In fact, one upscale and well-known city within the Los Angeles area is facing numerous lawsuits over the injuries sustained by kids becoming injured on PIP, tiled or play mat installations. When they consulted with a certified playground inspector afterwards, he informed them, "...that stuff (PIP) isn't safe!" Playing on Top of Carcinogens? The colorful top-layer on most PIP surfaces is comprised of EPDM (ethylene propylene diene monomer), which is a synthetic rubber elastomer used in a number of applications, including roofing. A number of years ago, some companies that install synthetic turf experimented with using EPDM as in-fill, instead of granulated recycled rubber. When some well-intentioned and ill informed consumers started getting concerned about the safety issues surrounding the use of recycled tire rubber, a large company in Europe chose to perform a detailed research study on both recycled tire rubber and EPDM. What they found out was alarming. It appears that EPDM, when exposed to sunlight, heat and other environmental elements, releases a yellow to orange (amber colored) waxy substance, which also happens to contain carcinogenic compounds. What they ended up proving was that recycled tire rubber was very safe, unless submerged within a water table, and that EPDM contained far more dangerous elements that could potentially cause harm to humans or animals. Wait... This Stuff Costs How Much? Maybe you didn't know that most PIP surfaces, and even tiles or mats for playground fall safety cost way more than the safest product in the world, SoftStuff, yet they provide a whole host of problems and ultimately very little fall height safety. Often, if an installer tries to coerce customers into "blending" black with their EPDM colors within the top-layer or wear course, they are choosing to use SBR (styrene-butadiene rubber or recycled tire rubber) along with the EPDM. This is done to save money, because EPDM costs exponentially more than SBR, and also tends to discolor the EPDM pretty rapdily. Thereby reducing the vibrancy of the installed product appearance. Now consider this, would you want to pay $8-$10/sf for a basic color, or $12-$15/sf for anything with a design, if you knew that it would not provide the safety you thought you were expecting? Probably not. What's Wrong With Aliphatic Binders? Some agencies, such as the Los Angeles Unified School District, won't even allow the use of aliphatics at any of their locations, due to the high VOCs (volatile organic compounds) which can release vapors or gasses from solids or liquids which can have very negative effects on humans, resulting in chronic health issues. While it may result in more vibrant colors and reduce the "yellowing" of the binder coating the upper layer, the potential for detrimental outcomes are identifiable and very real. Even though MDI (methyl diphenyl diisocyanate) binders may be used, the waxy substance that oozes out of the EPDM top-layer tends to cause any binder to break down over just a few years. $20.00 or More per Square Foot? That's right, in most cases on public playgrounds, the cost to install play mats, tiles or poured-in-place will cost around $12 or more per square foot. Most poured-in-place surfacses start to deteriorate typically in about 3 years, which then require patching and re-application of the binding agent, at a cost of about $3.00 per square foot. Another 3 years, another $3.00 per square foot. We've even been contacted by a company that repairs these surfaces, and they admitted PIP isn't safe. In all good conscience, they couldn't continue to repair substandard playground surfaces over and over, when the cost to repair was more than half the cost of SoftStuff -- the safest playground surfacing in the world!
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