As managing director of his own consultancy firm that consults to municipalities all over Australia and New Zealand, co-founder of the Australian National Sports Convention and chair of the Outdoor Sports Surfaces Expert Circle of the International Association for Sports and Leisure Facilities (IAKS), Martin Sheppard is a familiar face on the international outdoor sports surfaces scene. For years, he has been advocating a smart integration of this type of technological surface in today’s society. “Anybody in local government who has a responsibility for a natural environment is a custodian for the future generations and the future generations are who we need to have synthetic surfaces for. The young of today across western civilisations aren’t physically active enough and the research is showing that globally.

Sedentary lifestyles was already starting to be an issue when I moved from the UK to Australia 30 years ago. The challenge is still ahead of us, and while many governments recognise this there hasn’t been a significant change,” he says recalling how synthetic turf saw the light in the early 1960s after the US Army realised that recruits coming from the countryside were actually fitter and healthier than their peers from the cities. “The army put that down to the amount of grass that was available in the countryside, which is why the US Government teamed up with Monsanto to develop a synthetic grass to replicate this in builtup areas, thinking it would encourage young people to be more active.”

Population growth

The need for the integration of synthetic turf into modern society is further fuelled by the way society is growing. “In the past 25 years, the Australian population has increased by 25% to approximately 28 million today, and it is expected to increase by another 25% in the next 25 years to 34 million. That is going to be a huge change on the natural environment to be able to cope with the demand of the additional population, particularly as they are predominantly going to be located around metro cities. However, we are finding that as our cities grow vertical to accommodate all those people, we are not investing in the amount of land that is needed to satisfy the physical activity of the people who choose to be active, never mind the people who are sedentary. That is where synthetic turf can add value.”