Did You Know?
Landscaping Facts
- According to an EPA study of 19 urban areas, more than 5 percent of air pollution comes from landscaping tools
- One hour of mowing the lawn pollutes as much as 100 miles of driving and the average American spends 40 hours a year mowing – equivalent to 4000 miles of driving
- Keeping lawns green uses as much as half of all the fresh water used in urban areas each year, according to the E.P.A.
- Older gas lawnmowers emit as much pollution in an hour as an average car driving 18.7 miles
- Every year Americans throw away 24 million tons of leaves and grass. Leaves alone account for 75% of solid waste in the fall. All of this needs to be trucked to landfills or processing locations far away from urban centers.
Success Stories:
Home Composting in Lafayette
Submitted By: Bart Carr (bart_carr@yahoo.com) Challenge Like many homes in Lafayette, we have a large, well landscaped front and back yard including grass lawns, shrubbery, lots trees, and a seasonal vegetable garden. All of this requires weekly maintenance producing yard waste for disposal. Using our 65 gallon yard waste recycling cart as a measure, our [...]
Siphoning Bathtub Water to Irrigate Our Yard
Submitted By: Renee Emerson (rmkemerson@aol.com) Challenge We have always been interested in recycling everything possible. A little over three years ago we looked into using our gray water to water the yard, but found the plumbing changes necessary to make a permanent system cost prohibitive. Meanwhile, we had three teenage girls who all loved [...]
Planting a Drought-Tolerant Lawn
Submitted By: Mary Ransdell (mbransdell@comcast.net) Challenge: To conserve water and still have a front “lawn”. When my family purchased our home in Lafayette in 2008, about 900 square feet of the front garden was made up of a patchy, grass – and the sprinkler system had long been defunct. With water being such a precious [...]
A New “Mow and Blow” Model
Submitted By: Steve Richard (swrichard@comcast.net) Challenge Every time our weekly “mow and blow” lawn service came to cut our grass and blow our leaves around, I felt somewhat annoyed by all the noise, but put up with it anyway, figuring our lawn was too large to cut myself. After reading about the amount of emissions [...]
