To Michael Townsend and his co-workers, maintaining an outdoor rink as the winters get warmer felt like a Sisyphean task.
Mr. Townsend and his crew increasingly worked overtime flooding the rink at Eugene T. Mahoney State Park in Ashland, Neb., with water and driving a Zamboni throughout the night to maintain the ice.
When the 26-year-old rink needed to be replaced in 2024, Mr. Townsend found that new compressors to chill the ice and pipes underneath the rink would cost $2 million, a steep price for a rink that attracts about 7,500 skaters a season.
So the park replaced the ice with high-density polyethylene, which is durable, easy to assemble and cheap to maintain. This plastic surface also performs largely like ice, albeit with more friction, and skaters use regular ice skates. The price tag? About $350,000, including maintenance supplies.
“It was a needed transformation,” said Mr. Townsend, who is himself an avid skater. “It was going to be no skating or look for something that was more cost efficient.”
Climate change has wreaked havoc with many sports. Increasingly, severe storms delay golf and tennis matches. Intense heat has led to mandatory water breaks at the World Cup.
But few sports have been affected as much as those played on ice and snow. At the 2026 Winter Games in Milan-Cortina, skaters and skiers complained of soft and slushy surfaces. Rising temperatures have reduced the amount of pond ice where young people in northern climates learn to skate.
Warming temperatures and aging rinks, which can leak dangerous chemicals into the atmosphere, have led more rink operators to turn to plastic ice. Conventional ice rinks require refrigerants, lots of fresh water and electricity, and, if they are indoors, energy-intensive dehumidifiers. Some older rinks also have leaky pipes that can allow ozone-depleting chemicals like hydrochlorofluorocarbons, or even toxic and flammable ammonia, to escape, posing an environmental and health hazard.
According to Glice, a large plastic ice maker, the market in the United States, including potentially a million backyard rinks, is worth $5.4 billion. Randy Scharberg, a salesman at Xtraice, another synthetic ice company, estimated that several hundred full-size synthetic rinks were in operation across the United States. The National Hockey League uses plastic ice at some of its training facilities.
Some environmentalists are alarmed. Turning to plastic, made from fossil fuels, is fraught. Plastic production is projected to surge in the coming decades and will account for a growing share of emissions of planet-warming gases, said Allen Hershkowitz, a former senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council and the founder of the Green Sports Alliance.
“The paradox is that, while trying to limit leaking of refrigerants, they’re increasing the production of plastics,” he said. “I don’t want to see hockey go away, but this is a real issue and hockey needs to take a hard look at it.”
There is also the issue of microplastics, the plastic particulate pollution that has become ubiquitous in the environment. Microplastics have been found in human blood, lungs and placentas, raising concerns about their health effects.
Plastic ice rinks almost certainly generate microplastics because they are made of polyethylene and exposed to constant friction from skates — but there has been little rigorous study of how much is produced, said Sanjay Mohanty, an associate professor of environmental engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“Even seemingly small amounts, like a couple of grams of plastic shavings per square meter per month, translate into millions of particles,” he said.
When Mr. Townsend took a spin around his new rink one day last month, a line of white residue was left on the blades of his skates. He later drove a specialized floor polisher over the rink that smoothed out the surface and swept up a small pile of shavings.
Viktor Meier, a co-founder and the chief executive of Glice, said he was developing new synthetic ice that reduced the indentations created by skates, which would reduce the amount of microplastics. He said this would increase the amount of glide and decrease the amount of shavings.
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Still, the concerns about synthetic ice must be weighed against what it is replacing: A single traditional rink can emit hundreds of tons of carbon dioxide annually, according to research by the Canada Green Municipal Fund, a government agency that funds sustainable infrastructure. Producing a five-ton plastic ice rink would produce a fraction of that carbon footprint.
A one-time purchase of a plastic rink has a lower carbon footprint than the huge amount of electricity required to run refrigeration compressors for a traditional ice rink, said Matthias Scherge, a researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials in Germany. “It’s definitely a big difference.”
Fourteen winters ago, Robert McLeman, a professor in environmental studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, started Rink Watch, a citizen science project that asked skaters to report skating conditions at backyard and community rinks through the winter. The data from nearly 20,000 rinks was distressing. In cities like Toronto or Boston, backyard rinks were becoming so unreliable that many people stopped building them, Professor McLeman said.
“It’s not the most catastrophic impact of global warming, but for communities where pond hockey and backyard rinks are part of the cultural identity, it represents a real loss,” he said.
It also clouds the future of the N.H.L., which needs a steady stream of new players — and future fans — not just in colder climates but across the Sun Belt states. The league has no plan to play games on plastic ice, even though several teams use it in their training facilities. In January, the league also donated the plastic rink used by players to practice on before the Winter Classic game in Miami to SLAM Miami, a charter school in the Little Havana neighborhood.
“Synthetic ice is not a substitute for traditional ice, but it is a strategically valuable tool for us to grow the game,” said Kim Davis, who oversees sustainability initiatives at the N.H.L.
The rink’s panels, made by Green Hockey, a Swiss company, include up to 50 percent recycled plastic recovered from the oceans. Students, few of whom have ever skated, now play street hockey in their sneakers on the rink. Once they are familiar with the game, the school plans to teach them how to skate.
“We’re going to have some face plants at first,” Derek Elvin, a gym teacher, joked.
In Nebraska, Mr. Townsend said his new rink had a 12-year warranty. Glice told him that after a decade or so, he could flip over the tiles and skate on the other side.
On a sunny day with the temperatures near 75 degrees last month, Michelle Lewis brought her son and daughter to the Nebraska rink, which she did not know had been replaced with synthetic ice. The children, who previously used roller and in-line skates, wobbled across the ice like beginners. “This is how they look when they’re ice skating,” Ms. Lewis said.
Ken Belson is a Times reporter covering sports, power and money at the N.F.L. and other professional sports leagues.
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