In one of my previous articles in this blog I was writing about several safety surfacing alternatives for playgrounds whenever the available budget is not enough to use my preferred wetpour option and one of the alternatives I mentioned was rubber tiles.
One of the frequent readers of my blog after reading it, explained me that he was working on an innovative product of safety surfacing, planned to be introduced at the first quarter of 2020. Just a few weeks later COVID exploded as a worldwide disruption and they had no easy ways to show the product to the relevant customers and prescriptors in their targeted markets.
His company ECOSAFE2 is located in Sweden, one of the countries with greater environmental and health impact awareness (https://www.ecosafe2.com/).
Is then easy to understand why their innovation is related to a significant improvement in one of the products that was usually using recycled end of life tyres with some level of PAHs and heavy materials. They have developed an alternative solution to the conventional fall protection system based on rubber tiles, that offers several advantages:
- Free from toxic chemicals during assembly.
- Free from SBR.
- Meeting local requirements regarding leaching of zinc.
- Provide a solution to minimize migration of microplastics.
According to them, the product is currently the only one that meets content and life cycle requirements that is set up the national building evaluation companies. (Byggvarubedömningen, SundaHus and Nordic Swan.) with requirements based in ECHAs directives and National policies.
This ECOSAFE² is a fall protection tile with an EPDM top and a PE bottom, assembled with blocks of PE instead of plugs. This ensures the same HIC value over the whole surface including the joints.
The block solution also ensures that the seams wills remain quite closed, and can be easily removed for play equipment inspection at playgrounds, to repair damaged tiles or to improve sub-base. It can be also be a good fit for temporary installations as they are reusable and easy to install and remove.
If you have also done some product innovations during this difficult time of pandemic and they are related to safety surfacing for playground and leisure applications, explain them to me and I will be more than happy to give you some visibility in this humble blog, for free, of course.
Take care.
Rubberman Blog 