To repurpose a garbage tip to become one of Australia’s most loved children’s playgrounds requires several things: good landscaping potential and ideas, designing a lot of play value with motivating play equipment, high dose of innovation and good technology on both the equipment and the safety surfacing and of course finally a close residential area with young families and thousands of children willing to climb, jump, roll over, socialize, and get new friends.
Sidney Olympic Park
The Sydney Olympic Park Authority (SOPA) was planning a refresh on the Blaxland Riverside Park Playground. The surroundings are high density areas such as Wentworth Point, Mariner’s Cove, Rhodes, and Sydney Olympic Park, so the thousands of users were almost guaranteed.
Blaxland Riverside Park, home of this famous play space span three hectares, providing kids of all ages and abilities a huge range of activities and challenges.
Located next to the Parramatta River, Blaxland Riverside Park is a children’s paradise
That implies high demand and an intensive use of the area in a terrain of rolling hills, with high temperature and UV radiation during a significant part of the year. All these factors pose a difficult challenge to the attenuation flooring and previous solutions using granulated EPDM rubber and bark mulch tended to wear and to shrink reducing the durability of the surfacing in safe conditions.
Regal Innovations, a commercial landscaper, together with Todd Kitson, Senior Manager of Parklands at SOPA, selected Polysoft top layer with the existing rubber underlay after the research conducted by Dr. Sebastian Pfautsch, Associate Professor in Urban Studies at the University of Western Sidney.
Dr. Pfautsch’s work showed in his studies that the Polyolefin top layer of Polysoft had the best performance on heat reducing properties. During summer this top layer was several degrees cooler in areas where previous EPDM was too hot for a comfortable and safe use by the kids.
Under these severe conditions the top layer keeps its rich colours and clean feeling underfoot.
Regal Innovations’ Project Manager, Jake Clarke, explained that the top layer of polyolefin beads bound in aliphatic binder, pours very easily, and then it’s almost like a self-leveller, so you just screed it up very easily to get a beautiful area.
They used in this Blaxland Riverside Park, green, white, yellow, blue and terracotta colours that currently keep the colour as the first day.
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Rubberman Blog 