A brief history of Artificial Grass

      It is thought that the first installation of synthetic turf at a major sporting venue occurred in Houston, Texas, at the Astrodome in 1966. ChemGrass, a short-fiber, dense nylon carpet, was installed over a compacted soil base in the stadium. The subsequent year, a closed-cell, elastomeric foam pad was installed between the carpet backing and the soil. ChemGrass was soon referred to as AstroTurf. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, many newly constructed multisport stadiums and several existing stadiums replaced their natural turfgrass with AstroTurf. The intrigue was based on the surface’s ability to withstand a high volume of traffic while still providing a consistent playing surface. This enabled cities to construct multiuse stadiums with movable seating that could host a variety of concert and sporting events in a condensed time period without damaging the playing surface. However, by the later part of the 1980s, this first-generation synthetic turf was receiving criticism for its possible contribution to athlete injuries

     Subsequently, second-generation synthetic turf, first invented in 1976 by Frederick T. Haas, was introduced. These second-generation surfaces included a shock-absorbing pad beneath a carpet that contained much longer fibers compared with the first-generation systems. The carpet pile was filled with silica sand to within several millimeters of the top of the fibers, allowing them to stand upright. While second-generation playing surfaces were not widely adopted within the United States, they did pave the way for the modern, third-generation systems now commonly used.

     Similar to second-generation turf, third-generation surfaces are an infilled system wherein the space between the vertical pile fibers is filled with a granular material. Third-generation systems use an infill material consisting of either crumb rubber or a combination of crumb rubber and silica sand, as opposed to the pure sand typical of second-generation systems. The first of these third-generation systems was developed by FieldTurf and was installed in 1997 at a high school in Pennsylvania. Since then, several companies have developed similar products.