Cleanliness
While a dirty kid may be a happy kid, many parents don’t want their kids to look like they played in a pig pen after visiting the playground. Given this, we consider cleanliness to be one of the key elements upon which playground surfacing is evaluated.
Cleanliness
Winners
For the most part, all unitary surfaces get high marks for cleanliness as they don’t get into or onto one’s clothing or body like loose-fill surfaces. They don’t stain. And, they don’t get tracked all over the playground or back into a building. As far as we are concerned, they all pass with high marks.
Cleanliness
Losers
In contrast, all loose fill materials get relatively poor marks for cleanliness simply because they get everywhere. Even when the material is clean like engineered wood fiber, kids end up getting it in their clothes and tracking it throughout the playground and into the building. Plus loose-fill surfaces acquire a lot of other organic materials, foreign objects, insects and other unwanted elements that infiltrate the playground.
