Rubberecycle News

A Safer Environment to Play In

Is the playground surfacing something that needs much consideration? I think it is.

When we entrust someone else with our children, we don’t expect them to take them on a dangerous quest, where they are going to be put at risk. So why should we put them at risk when we take them to the playground area. I’m not saying every playground is a dangerous place, but a lot of them are out-dated.

Not outdated, in the things they have for the children to play with, but with things like the playground surfacing and what surrounds the play areas. Take all that mulch stuff, I mean, please take all that old, smelly, wooden and rotting mulch away. It is no good for children to be running around in, let alone rolling around in that stuff. We have entered the Twenty First century, for pity sake, can’t we be a bit more environmental about what we use for playground surfacing.

We do have tire recycling, and have done since the late sixties. Okay we are starting to use the rubber for better things now, but that is the point, we now have the technology and know how to create rubber soil, which will not harm our children. We have enough rubber to make each and every playground safety record the same, the whole world over.

We can actually have playground surfacing that is beneficial to our environmental needs. Somebody did not just think up, just to get rid of the wooden stuff, as rubber mulch is actually a lot better and safer than any other playground surface. It also enables us to use our tire recycling facilities to the best of their abilities - by making a safer area for our kids to play in.

So when we look at the playground surfacing the next time we are with our kids, lets not just think, ’My, that looks bad’, but lets think ‘that could be so much better’ and now we know how better it could be, so bring in the rubber mulch, rubber soil and any other recycled rubber thing we can use, to give our kids, what we did not have.

A safer environment to play in.

Playground Safety - Considerations and Regrets

Whilst walking through my local park the other day, I noticed that inside the young children's play area, everything seemed to be nicely painted, the swings looked safe, the roundabout looked clean of graffiti and the slide was clean. Now this is nice, I thought, until I looked at the playground surface around each piece of equipment.

What was there actually made me stand back in horror. Now I remember when my own daughter was younger (she's sixteen now), we would go to a park and everything would be just so, if not all that environmental, but the playground surface would actually be attached to the ground. The equipment in it was carefully considered for its playground safety and there was even some rubber mulch type stuff that looked more like rubber soil, than anything else.

So I thought to myself, what is going on with the local authority and playground safety?

Obviously not a lot.

The actual playground surface was old concrete that had probably been laid in the fifties, with some kind of bouncy tarmac (do you remember the stuff?) that was once thought to be more environmental than tire recycling.

Why on earth do we pay all these local taxes?

To use in our community! Well that's what I thought. It does seem some times that our kids are getting the butt end of the deal, when it comes to their happiness and safety.

We want things to look nice and have playground safety, at the same time. We want it to be fun and have playground surfacing that will not trip up our kids, so they end up in hospital, instead of back at home looking forward to next time they can go to the park.

We need more playground safety to be taken into consideration, whilst using things like rubber soil and environmental, rubber mulch. After all we want our kids to enjoy their childhoods, not think back and say, 'I wish the playground near me had been better fun'.

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