Building an Eco-Friendly Playground

Do you want to go green with your playground area for your children? Or do you want to create a eco-friendly playground for use by local children? My church thought the traditional plastic playground equipment was out of touch with today's green movement so for our preschool program we wanted to craft a environmentally friendly set of playground equipment.

What is the first thing we learned? That it is not so easy to obtain local products in Minnesota! With freezing and thawing happening multiple times a year, we not only needed green playground equipment, but also equipment that could withstand large swings in temperature resulting in lots of freezing and thawing. Flowing water was the enemy we had to combat and where many plastics show more resistance.

A wooden playground set would seem to be a viable eco-friendly option, especially one that was made out of forest planted and grown specifically for harvest and human consumption. Unfortunately we learned that a lot of wood products are specially treated with withstand weathering with a chemical called chromated copper arsenate. a) This chemical is very toxic and leads to arsenic concentrations in the soil. We definitely did not want small preschool children around this kind of material - not only is it not so good for kids who tend to put their hands in their mouths, but it also was not good for the environment.

We discovered you can get untreated wood, but you have to be very specific about it and make sure the manufacturer certifies it as an environmentally friendly option. They typically are made with some kind of rot resistant cedar wood. However, we found that this did not meet our needs because of our water freezing and melting problems. Even treated wood at the public playgrounds have a fairly short lifespan before start to deteriorate. So we went looking for something else.

We ended up needing to go with plastic for our playground. The question because, then, what kind of environmentally friendly plastic would we be able to find. Luckily, there are several manufacturers of 100% recycled plastic playground equipment.

We chose Play Mart Playgrounds who makes their equipment from recycled milk jugs. b) They are also certified for safety performance by a third party certification service. Not only that, but as our preschool may grow, they offer a "Take Back" program which allows us to recycle the current playground equipment and credit that toward the purchase of other kinds of product they offer (or more playground equipment). And finally, one of the big reasons we went with this company was the 100 year warranty on many of their parts against weathering.

a) Fact Sheet - Chromated Copper Arsenate (CCA) - Treated Wood Used in Playground Equipment. http://www.cpsc.gov/phth/ccafact.html

b) Play Mart's homepage. http://www.playmart.com