“Forget the glitz and glamour of the corporate look, or the overwhelming overload of useless information that comes with many a slick company representative”
Dr Colin Mumford
develop rigour and best practice. Not asking a company how and why they do things may mean that the wool is being pulled firmly over your eyes, and that you are possibly just about to pay for a service you don’t need.
How is the contamination level assessed, and how much is a bad thing?
Well firstly, to put the cat amongst the pigeons, it’s near impossible to determine the level of contamination without physically measuring it. All too often, company representatives will turn up and make an assessment by dragging a foot across the surface, or maybe even getting a finger tip dirty by touching the carpet; it’s akin to kicking a car wheel to measure its air pressure. If you are really lucky, they may prod or scrape the surface with a screwdriver or some sort of tine, ultimately, however, they will then say “this needs replacing, it’s too contaminated”. This is an example of a subjective assessment; the finger in the air variant or, should I say, finger on the ground. True, there are degrees of subjectivity. For instance, if it is black and slimy with gloop floating on top, then yes, you can be pretty confident that the infill is contaminated and that a test isn’t really necessary. If, on the other
hand, you remove a sample of infill and rub it between your fingers and it stains your fingers or feels slippery, it is probably contaminated, but by how much?
If you leap onto the internet or delve
through your local library you will find a small body of research on sand infill contamination. Eventually, you will find this golden nugget “The effect of particulate contamination on the infiltration rates of synthetic turf surfaces” by Dr Andy McLeod and Dr Iain James. In their research they found that infiltration rates are significantly reduced when contamination levels are greater than 10% (by volume). So that answers the question of how much contamination is a bad thing; 10% contamination is the threshold value at which surface drainage starts to go pear shaped. The next question to tackle is how do you measure it?
Measuring contamination
Forget the glitz and glamour of the corporate look, or the overwhelming overload of useless information that comes with many a slick company representative. To test the contamination level requires the representative to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty, which is
probably why testing of this type - or any type for that matter - doesn’t happen very often. Why do something practical and objective, when subjective bull will secure a sale or contract? To objectively measure the level of contamination in the infill requires a simple sedimentation test, as refined by Drs. McLeod and James. This is where a representative sample of the surfaces infill is removed and mixed with some water and a dispersal agent in a tall transparent cylinder receptacle; the mixture is agitated and then left to settle.
The heavier mineral component of the infill (the sand) will settle first, and the lighter contamination - the bird poo, the skin flakes, and the algae - will, eventually, settle on top of the sand, leaving two distinct layers of infill.
The layers are then measured, and the volume of contamination is calculated by dividing the depth of the contamination (in millimetres) by the depth of the sand infill layer. The result is then multiplied by 100 to give a percentage (by volume). Measuring multiple samples from
across the whole playing area will give a more accurate view of the
contamination levels. The necessity for infill remediation by a specialist
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