Spring Training

Maybe you're not in the same league as Ty Cobb or Lou Gehrig but you still need to manage your home field grass.  The beginning of Spring is the perfect time to practice incremental environmentalism and change one polluting habit, how you mow your lawn.

You already know that you spend a decent amount of money on watering your lawn and finding creative ways to keep it green.  Most people are not aware that their lawn mower is a heavy polluter, worse than your car.  In fact, a small gas lawn mower spews a whopping 4 times the pollution than your car in ONE HOUR of operation.  It's the equivalent of 11 cars on the road for a big mulching mower and 34 cars for a riding mower all driving 55 mph for an hour.  These emissions include carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide and un-burnt hydrocarbons.  Did you ever notice you wreak after mowing the lawn?

So, why is the lawn mower a bigger polluter than your car and why do you end up smelling like Pigpen when you're  done mowing your lawn?  Your lawn mower doesn't have a catalytic converter.  The device, a standard on cars since the 1970's, lowers emissions.  It would make the lawn mower cost prohibitive and too big for the average consumer to add one, so figuring that they only get used once per week during the grass growing season, lawn mowers were never given a catalytic converter.

If that's not enough to make you want to second guess your lawn mower, then another shocking item is that each year Americans manage to spill 17 million gallons of gas when filling up our lawn mowers.  Don't believe me?  Watch any 13 year old fill up a lawn mower's gas tank.  Even I get drips down the side of the tank sometimes.  This wastes a precious fossil fuel and contaminates the ground water and soil.

The end result is a heavy polluter that most people don't think anything about because you can pick one up at the hardware store for as cheap as $150.

So, what's the solution?  

1.  Re-think your landscape without grass.  Grow edible plants!  Throw down rock; plant a flower garden or you can even invest in ornamental grasses that never require cutting and require less water than traditional lawn grass.  The downside is that grass helps cool down the planet unlike black asphalt or dark rock that can heat things up.  The other downside is that kids, swing sets and rock do not mix.  (Although, you don't need grass for a good playground.  San Francisco has a fantastic urban playground on the roof of the Moscone Convention Center.  The play surface is recycled from old tires, shoes and other discarded rubber items and it's thrilling to walk and run on.  The colors come in an enticing array of colors others than black.)
2. Buy an electric lawn mower.  The cost is in the same range as a traditional gas mower.  The downside is the power.  While it only costs about $5 a year to operate, you have to run an extension cord and you're bound to the grid for your power.  If the lights go out or you run over your extension cord, there is no mowing for you.
3. A push mower.  Yes, the kind your grandparents had.  No emissions, no fossil fuels and little maintenance (just sharpen the blades once per year and spray the works with a little WD-40 every once in a while). The downside?  If you have a really big lawn, you might have to start mowing again as soon as you finish.
4. Battery and solar powered mowers.  It's not too far off when battery powered mowers will be a mainstream item.  However, they cost a few hundred dollars more than an electric or gas mower so you probably won't find a battery operated mower at Home Depot.  The downside here is cost and they aren't as readily available.

While none of the solutions are without downsides I think we can all make a difference by employing several of the strategies to get us closer to shutting off the gas mower.

Here is what we did: we replaced our mower with a push mower.  It does require more work to operate but we found that we could mow our lawn and it only really added 15 minutes to mow our 1/4 of an acre of grass.  The best part is there are no fumes and little noise.  You can listen to your iPod at a safe volume while you mow.  The kids can be outside while you mow because it doesn't send debris flying off at eye gouging speeds.  It is great exercise, although I was easily able to mow the lawn when I was 8 months pregnant.  

Next we started chipping away at the amount of grass we have.  Wherever possible, we have or are in the process of replacing grass with gardens.  Some of the garden space contains drought resistant (low water) flowering plants while the rest of the garden is edible.  However strange it may seem, there will be tomatoes growing in our front yard this year.  The winter months might be a bit of a visual challenge but the grass doesn't look so great in the winter either.  We will probably have a lot of kale, garlic and onions planted.

The end result is the kids still have grass to play on, we have vegetables growing to save us grocery money and we are not spewing angry fumes when we mow.

Gas powered mowers are a real part of our pollution and energy consumption problems.  By changing our lawn mowing habits we are decreasing pollutants.  Reducing this particular pollution makes a huge difference, especially for vulnerable people like kids with asthma.