Nate and I went for a walk Tuesday evening, and ended up at the playground across the street from our apartment. Oh, what a good time. There was swinging and monkey bars and funny little knobby seat things that you had to balance on. It was tons of fun, I tell you.Most importantly, the playground gave me my first experience with rubber mulch. At first glance, rubber mulch just looked like regular ol' wood chips - but when I jumped onto it, good Lord! It was springy! It was a super-weird sensation. It was fun to fall off the monkey bars and have the fall be cushioned. But why do we need cushioned falls at the playground? When I was a kid, my school playground was covered in loose gravel, which made for some awesome scrapes if you fell down, but I survived. Is it such a litigious culture that schools have to put down the equivalent of chopped-up rubber mats to protect the children, so parents don't sue if their kid gets a scraped elbow?
rubber wood chips - C
4 comments:
1) I think they used old Firestone tires from the Ford Explorer rollover debacle to make a lot of those playgrounds in Michigan, since they had so many they recalled.
2) I could be wrong, but I'm fairly certain your first experience with rubber mulch was actually at Timbertown in the MP, shortly before you saw a whole new side of Sue & Mike...
My opinion of the rubber mulch is much like my opinion of anesthesia. I mean, if you can go through something with less physical pain, why not? And it's bouncy. You just can't argue with bounciness.
I think that recycling tires and turning them into cushioning for the playground sounds like a fabulous idea myself. Gravel hurts when it gets stuck in a wound, and who likes to hurt?
As far as I know, EPCDS still has that same gravel. I wonder: if you ran a DNA test on it, would we show up?
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