FIELD NOTE · SUPPLEMENTAL SET
Eight years protected, six years to remove: the plastic lawn and the clocks running under it
ISSUEDJULY 11, 2026DRAWN BY THE NIGHTLY SWEEP
A synthetic lawn does very little anyone notices in its first several summers, which was most of the appeal, and the fibers lie down under foot traffic and ultraviolet slowly enough that nobody registers the change from one August to the next. The soil underneath does nothing visible either, sealed under a weed barrier and a compacted base, waiting. Both of those are clocks, and what makes artificial turf worth a landscape contractor's attention right now is that the legal clock and the material clock in California were set by people who were not looking at one another.
The old version of this story says the state banned the stuff over forever chemicals. The state did not.
SB 676 did not ban anything, it amended Government Code section 53087.7, which since AB 1164 in 2015 had forbidden cities, counties and charter cities from prohibiting synthetic grass or artificial turf on residential property. What it did was pull the plastic out of the protected category, so the section now shelters only drought-tolerant landscaping "using living plant material." AB 1164 was approved October 9, 2015, and the amendment became operative January 1, 2024. The preemption stood eight years and three months, and what replaced it was not a rule but a delegation, the question handed back down to city councils.
AB 1423 was the chemistry bill, and it would have barred public entities and educational institutions from installing artificial turf containing regulated PFAS from January 1, 2026, and barred its manufacture and sale statewide from the same date. It was vetoed, and consideration of that veto was stricken from file on January 29, 2024. California has no statute limiting PFAS in artificial turf. Anyone who tells a homeowner the state acted on the chemistry is describing a bill that died.
Millbrae, up in San Mateo County, adopted Chapter 8.65 of its municipal code on October 24, 2023, effective January 1, 2024, prohibiting synthetic or artificial non-organic material that simulates sod, grass or lawn ground cover. Turf installed legally before that date may stay, but only while it is kept free of holes, tears, stains, discoloration, seam separation and excessive wear, and only while it still passes stormwater. Once it shows visible wear, or stops draining, or is damaged beyond 35 percent of replacement cost, natural landscaping goes in. Millbrae wrote its deadline as a condition of the material rather than a date on a calendar, which is unusually honest drafting.
San Marino, in Los Angeles County, went the other way. Ordinance O-24-1413 passed 4-1 on September 27, 2024, codified at San Marino Municipal Code section 23.16.24, prohibiting artificial turf, synthetic grass and synthetic plants outright except for 200 square feet in a rear yard. Anything legally installed before September 13, 2023 has to be gone by October 31, 2030.
The majority's stated grounds ran wider than chemistry: PFAS and BPA, stormwater runoff and environmental contamination, the expected degradation of the material within about six years, and the code-enforcement burden of policing maintenance across thousands of homes. Vice Mayor Gretchen Shepherd Romey put it as the environmental issues now being indisputable. Councilman Tony Chou cast the dissenting vote, saying the city grandfathers existing property modifications rather than compelling their removal, which is the strongest thing anybody said in that room.
Two adoptions have been reported since the delegation took effect, and only one of them is in Southern California. The Los Angeles City Council's Energy and Environment Committee voted 4-0 on June 28, 2024 to study whether a ban was feasible, and two years later the largest city in the region has adopted nothing.
The Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment released its Final Report on Synthetic Turf on March 5, 2026, from a study begun in June 2015 under contract with CalRecycle, and found no significant health risks to players, coaches or spectators from field chemicals in crumb rubber infill. That is what it studied. It is not a finding about the blades or the backing.
The Department of Toxic Substances Control is looking at the blades and the backing. Its August 2024 background document reports fluoropolymers added to the blades during manufacture, short-chain PFASs found in later testing beyond those intentional additions, and fluorotelomer alcohols detected in blades, and a Stockholm study in 2022 found total fluorine in all 51 samples it analyzed. DTSC frames all of it as potential exposure rather than demonstrated harm.
Then in February 2026 it paused. The Synthetic Turf Council had told the agency in 2024 that its members were working with suppliers so no product sold from 2025 would contain PFAS-based ingredients, including polymeric processing aids, and DTSC found that credible enough to hold off listing while it runs its own testing. Those results have not been published. Nobody outside the agency can say whether the turf on a pallet this month contains PFAS or not.
What is worth holding onto is that product rules bind manufacture and sale, never the lawn already in the ground, so every year the listing waits is another year of installed material no future rule can reach.
No state or federal agency has published a residential service life, and the August 2024 background document does not give one either. The nearest thing to a figure on the record from a body with nothing to sell is the San Marino council's own discussion of the material degrading within about six years. That is a city talking itself into a removal deadline rather than a laboratory result, and it is still the only estimate anywhere in this that did not come from somebody selling or installing the product.
The one regulator who has publicly sized the decay is European. Commission Regulation (EU) 2023/2055 of 25 September 2023 bans placing granular infill for synthetic sports surfaces on the market from 17 October 2031. Recital 53 gives the reason for the eight-year transition, which is to ensure that a larger number of existing synthetic sport surfaces using this product can reach their natural end-of-life before they need to be replaced.
It is the one fixed calendar date in any of this that was set by reference to how long the material lasts rather than to a budget cycle.
None of it touches artificial turf. Section 491 of Title 23 of the California Code of Regulations, which Water Code section 10608.12 cross-references for the definition, was revised January 3, 2025. It defines turf as a living ground cover surface of mowed grass, and it names the cool-season and warm-season grasses, tall fescue and bermudagrass among them. The load-bearing word is living, and it sits in the section the water statute actually points to.
A property manager staring down a 2028 date can satisfy it over a weekend with the exact product the Legislature declined to regulate in 2023, and the water-efficiency ordinance behind the paperwork has nothing to say about it either. The water clock and the material clock never touch.
California natives need supplemental water until established, which the California Native Plant Society puts at one to two years or until the plant has doubled in size, and by the second summer most low and very-low water species want water once a month or less outside the rainy periods. By the third summer most non-riparian natives hold with little or no irrigation. Riparian species stay dependent, and a dry hydrozone kills them on schedule. That curve runs opposite to the product it replaces, which is at its best on the afternoon it is unrolled.
Lay the two together on a San Marino lot and the arithmetic is unkind. A homeowner who installed under the 2015 preemption, removes on the 2030 deadline, and plants natives that autumn is not looking at an established landscape until 2033, which is eighteen years after the state first protected the plastic that displaced the soil. Whether the regional rebate programs will pay for any of that is a separate fight over what replaces the lawn, and it gets settled before the quote goes out or it gets settled afterward.
The crews who laid that carpet between 2015 and 2023 are the crews who will lift it, same lots, same driveways, opposite direction, on a deadline somebody else set. Anybody watching residential and common-area landscape filings across the San Gabriel Valley can see which properties move first, which a contractor working this conversion tracks through the permit record rather than door knocks.
The removal itself is unglamorous and physical. Someone backs a truck up a driveway in a spring before 2030, cuts the carpet into strips a person can carry, and finds the base rock underneath exactly where it was tamped a decade earlier, dry and dead and level. The mulch goes on after that, and then it waits.
The old version of this story says the state banned the stuff over forever chemicals. The state did not.
October 8, 2023
On that one day the Governor signed SB 676 (Allen), Chapter 498, Statutes of 2023, and vetoed AB 1423 (Schiavo), and the two actions point in opposite directions.SB 676 did not ban anything, it amended Government Code section 53087.7, which since AB 1164 in 2015 had forbidden cities, counties and charter cities from prohibiting synthetic grass or artificial turf on residential property. What it did was pull the plastic out of the protected category, so the section now shelters only drought-tolerant landscaping "using living plant material." AB 1164 was approved October 9, 2015, and the amendment became operative January 1, 2024. The preemption stood eight years and three months, and what replaced it was not a rule but a delegation, the question handed back down to city councils.
AB 1423 was the chemistry bill, and it would have barred public entities and educational institutions from installing artificial turf containing regulated PFAS from January 1, 2026, and barred its manufacture and sale statewide from the same date. It was vetoed, and consideration of that veto was stricken from file on January 29, 2024. California has no statute limiting PFAS in artificial turf. Anyone who tells a homeowner the state acted on the chemistry is describing a bill that died.
Two cities, nearly three years on
Delegated authority is only worth what somebody does with it, and mostly nobody has.Millbrae, up in San Mateo County, adopted Chapter 8.65 of its municipal code on October 24, 2023, effective January 1, 2024, prohibiting synthetic or artificial non-organic material that simulates sod, grass or lawn ground cover. Turf installed legally before that date may stay, but only while it is kept free of holes, tears, stains, discoloration, seam separation and excessive wear, and only while it still passes stormwater. Once it shows visible wear, or stops draining, or is damaged beyond 35 percent of replacement cost, natural landscaping goes in. Millbrae wrote its deadline as a condition of the material rather than a date on a calendar, which is unusually honest drafting.
San Marino, in Los Angeles County, went the other way. Ordinance O-24-1413 passed 4-1 on September 27, 2024, codified at San Marino Municipal Code section 23.16.24, prohibiting artificial turf, synthetic grass and synthetic plants outright except for 200 square feet in a rear yard. Anything legally installed before September 13, 2023 has to be gone by October 31, 2030.
The majority's stated grounds ran wider than chemistry: PFAS and BPA, stormwater runoff and environmental contamination, the expected degradation of the material within about six years, and the code-enforcement burden of policing maintenance across thousands of homes. Vice Mayor Gretchen Shepherd Romey put it as the environmental issues now being indisputable. Councilman Tony Chou cast the dissenting vote, saying the city grandfathers existing property modifications rather than compelling their removal, which is the strongest thing anybody said in that room.
Two adoptions have been reported since the delegation took effect, and only one of them is in Southern California. The Los Angeles City Council's Energy and Environment Committee voted 4-0 on June 28, 2024 to study whether a ban was feasible, and two years later the largest city in the region has adopted nothing.
Eleven years of study, and what it did not cover
Two California agencies are on the record, they are not saying the same thing, and neither has answered the other.The Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment released its Final Report on Synthetic Turf on March 5, 2026, from a study begun in June 2015 under contract with CalRecycle, and found no significant health risks to players, coaches or spectators from field chemicals in crumb rubber infill. That is what it studied. It is not a finding about the blades or the backing.
The Department of Toxic Substances Control is looking at the blades and the backing. Its August 2024 background document reports fluoropolymers added to the blades during manufacture, short-chain PFASs found in later testing beyond those intentional additions, and fluorotelomer alcohols detected in blades, and a Stockholm study in 2022 found total fluorine in all 51 samples it analyzed. DTSC frames all of it as potential exposure rather than demonstrated harm.
Then in February 2026 it paused. The Synthetic Turf Council had told the agency in 2024 that its members were working with suppliers so no product sold from 2025 would contain PFAS-based ingredients, including polymeric processing aids, and DTSC found that credible enough to hold off listing while it runs its own testing. Those results have not been published. Nobody outside the agency can say whether the turf on a pallet this month contains PFAS or not.
What is worth holding onto is that product rules bind manufacture and sale, never the lawn already in the ground, so every year the listing waits is another year of installed material no future rule can reach.
Where the carpet goes when it is finished
DTSC's August 2024 document is blunt about the end of life: artificial turf is most commonly landfilled after its intended use, evidence of recycling is minimal, and reuse is more common for the infill than for the blades and backing. Some companies have developed processes to recycle blades, backing and infill, so the capability exists on paper and the practice barely does.No state or federal agency has published a residential service life, and the August 2024 background document does not give one either. The nearest thing to a figure on the record from a body with nothing to sell is the San Marino council's own discussion of the material degrading within about six years. That is a city talking itself into a removal deadline rather than a laboratory result, and it is still the only estimate anywhere in this that did not come from somebody selling or installing the product.
The one regulator who has publicly sized the decay is European. Commission Regulation (EU) 2023/2055 of 25 September 2023 bans placing granular infill for synthetic sports surfaces on the market from 17 October 2031. Recital 53 gives the reason for the eight-year transition, which is to ensure that a larger number of existing synthetic sport surfaces using this product can reach their natural end-of-life before they need to be replaced.
It is the one fixed calendar date in any of this that was set by reference to how long the material lasts rather than to a budget cycle.
The water deadlines, 2027 onward, and what they define as turf
AB 1572 (Friedman), Chapter 849, Statutes of 2023, phases out potable water on nonfunctional turf by owner class: January 1, 2027 for state and local agency and public water system property, 2028 for commercial, industrial and institutional property, and 2029 for common areas of homeowners associations. The last tranche is local agency property in disadvantaged communities, January 1, 2031 or the date a state funding source is made available, whichever falls later.None of it touches artificial turf. Section 491 of Title 23 of the California Code of Regulations, which Water Code section 10608.12 cross-references for the definition, was revised January 3, 2025. It defines turf as a living ground cover surface of mowed grass, and it names the cool-season and warm-season grasses, tall fescue and bermudagrass among them. The load-bearing word is living, and it sits in the section the water statute actually points to.
A property manager staring down a 2028 date can satisfy it over a weekend with the exact product the Legislature declined to regulate in 2023, and the water-efficiency ordinance behind the paperwork has nothing to say about it either. The water clock and the material clock never touch.
The first summer after the carpet comes up
The soil is the only part of this with a schedule that improves.California natives need supplemental water until established, which the California Native Plant Society puts at one to two years or until the plant has doubled in size, and by the second summer most low and very-low water species want water once a month or less outside the rainy periods. By the third summer most non-riparian natives hold with little or no irrigation. Riparian species stay dependent, and a dry hydrozone kills them on schedule. That curve runs opposite to the product it replaces, which is at its best on the afternoon it is unrolled.
Lay the two together on a San Marino lot and the arithmetic is unkind. A homeowner who installed under the 2015 preemption, removes on the 2030 deadline, and plants natives that autumn is not looking at an established landscape until 2033, which is eighteen years after the state first protected the plastic that displaced the soil. Whether the regional rebate programs will pay for any of that is a separate fight over what replaces the lawn, and it gets settled before the quote goes out or it gets settled afterward.
The crews who laid that carpet between 2015 and 2023 are the crews who will lift it, same lots, same driveways, opposite direction, on a deadline somebody else set. Anybody watching residential and common-area landscape filings across the San Gabriel Valley can see which properties move first, which a contractor working this conversion tracks through the permit record rather than door knocks.
The removal itself is unglamorous and physical. Someone backs a truck up a driveway in a spring before 2030, cuts the carpet into strips a person can carry, and finds the base rock underneath exactly where it was tamped a decade earlier, dry and dead and level. The mulch goes on after that, and then it waits.