Synthetic turf fields are built to last eight to ten years—and when it comes out, tens of thousands of pounds of plastic have to go somewhere. Aduro CEO Ofer Vicus joins MLS Commissioner Don Garber and AstroTurf's Robert Mitchell on Bounty Uncharted to talk about what happens next: why turf's advantages drastically increase if what comes off the field gets recaptured, and how much of that material industry recycling still can't reach.
Read the full storyChanging the game on synthetic turf
The scale of the problem
- An average full-sized turf field weighs about 60,000 lbs — roughly the same plastic waste as 125 households produce in a year
- The U.S. has about 13,000 turf fields already installed, with 1,200–1,500 more built every year
- Combined U.S. and EU turf waste totals more than 230 million lbs annually — and only about 10% of it is currently reused or recycled, per the LIFETURF research initiative
- Turf still holds real advantages over grass: fields stay playable for 8–10 years without chemical treatment, and each one saves an estimated 500,000–1,000,000 gallons of irrigation water a year (Synthetic Turf Council)
Where Aduro fits in
AstroTurf already diverts more than 10 million lbs of polyethylene waste from landfills a year through its own recycling programs—but mechanical recycling alone can't separate the tightly bonded, contaminated PE and PP fibers left at end-of-life. In initial testing, Aduro's Hydrochemolytic™ Technology successfully converted those polyethylene and polypropylene components from real post-use turf samples, even with mixed materials and contamination present.
That result led to a Memorandum of Understanding between Aduro and AstroTurf—evaluation-stage work, not a commercial deployment, to determine how HCT could complement AstroTurf's existing recycling process. As Aduro CEO Ofer Vicus put it: "The goal is to work directly with a recognized name in synthetic turf to better understand the full end-of-life challenge."
The bigger picture
The story above is just the conversation—the full picture involves numbers most people never see: how much waste a single field leaves behind, how little of it gets recovered today, and what AstroTurf's own recycling programs have already managed to divert. We broke it all down, along with where Aduro's chemistry fits into the effort, in a closer look at turf's recycling challenge.
