Dealing with discarded synthetic turf – the Dutch way

Within three years of concerns being raised over the large heaps of discarded synthetic turf dotting the Dutch countryside, the Netherlands now has a flourishing synthetic turf recycling industry. As the wheels have started to turn, the question is: who will be next to be handed the baton in the sustainability cycle for synthetic turf?

By: Guy Oldenkotte

As the Netherlands was amongst the early adopters of third-generation synthetic turf at the start of the century, the country currently has one of the biggest synthetic turf field densities internationally. A 41,500 km² country with a population of 17.7 million, the Netherlands has approximately 3,500 full-size synthetic turf sports fields for either football or hockey, several hundred synthetic turf tennis and padel courts, and a few hundred playgrounds finished with the surface. As a result, the volume of discarded synthetic turf has been growing steadily towards approximately 1.5 to 2 million square metres per year. For many years, clubs and municipalities didn’t care much about what happened to the old surface the moment it left their premises. This quickly changed in 2018, when media drew attention to the issue and the environmental problems they were causing.

All gone

The Dutch discarded synthetic turf landscape has changed drastically since the start of this year. Gone are the big heaps at TUF Recycling in Dongen, a company that failed to live up its promises and became the incarnated reflection of the problem. And the heaps at the site of GBN-AGR in Amsterdam, the showcase of dealing with discarded synthetic turf the Dutch way, are gone too. The stockpile had been accumulating over two years but was completely processed in the second half of 2020. “We will soon start processing the stock that is currently sitting in our site in Hoorn. By the time the synthetic turf installation season is in full swing again, likely in June, our site will be empty and ready to take on new stock,” says Eric van Roekel who heads GBN-AGR. The company is a joint-venture between TenCate Grass Group (GreenFields and CSC Sport), Sport & Leisure Group (Domo Sports Grass and Limonta Sport), Antea Sport (Edel Grass and J&E Sports) and Dutch recycling specialist GBN. Further south, Teun Wouters of Topgrass echoes similar sentiments. Together with contractor Gubbels he cleared the site of TUF Recycling. “We are in the process of obtaining permission to move the machines we used to clear the site in Dongen to a permanent location near Bergen op Zoom. Here we intend to start recycling synthetic turf from fall this year.” Wouters is banking on his close relationship with Tarkett Sports, the only major company that has a large footprint in the Netherlands but that didn’t join the GBN-AGR joint-venture, to start with. Some of the synthetic turf reclaimed by Wouters and his team has been handed to the Morton Extrusionstechnik GmbH factory in Germany, where it is used in the production of various components of Tarkett Sports synthetic turf system.