Grasspave2

Greening a School Playground

So I've been trying to help get rid of an asphalt parkinglot at a school here in Los Angeles and replace it with something called Grasspave. 

Grasspave and other simliar approaches, allow for cars to drive on the grass without having the cars sink into the ground.  The school that I'm trying to help has an old parking lot that the kids play on for recess, and because it's old, it crumbles and they are constantly skinning their kness and getting injured.  Because the school has to maintain a certain number of parking spaces, they can't get rid of the parking lot altogether and turn it into a grassy playground, so we had to find a new solution.  Well, we found it in Grasspave.  It's like a normal, grassy field, but it can support a great amount of weight (see firetruck picture).  Not only that, because it's grass, storm water runoff now seeps back into the ground rather than run off back into the streets and the ocean.  The grass and soil then biofilters the storm water so we solve a pollution issue also.  If we put a cistern below the grasspave, we could collect water.  Wow.  A great solution!

But we came across a stumbling block that I realize is a stumbling block many run into when they are trying to implement green solutions, and that is: PERMITS.  It turns out that the City of Los Angeles does not allow grass parking lots.  They said that they are 10 YEARS AWAY from permiiting grass parking lots. 10 YEARS.  That's a glacial pace for change. That's where non-profits and others come in.  We are now writing to our City Council people to change the law.  This experience points to how frustrating it can be to work hard on a green solution, only to have an old bureuacracy get in the way.  But that happens a lot, and it's up to us to help change the rules so that sustainable practices can be used more broadly.