Green and often considered beautiful, there's more to a lawn than what meets the eye. Read about why having large expanses of lawn may be an environmental anachronism and why Ithaca College is exploring more environmentally friendly landscaping practices by reducing turfgrass lawns. These ideas and methods also apply to home lawn care.
An example of a what an non-lawn outdoor space can look like. Your own efforts may focus on grasses, wildflowers or a combination of both.
Americans have a love affair with lawns spending a great deal of time and money on their care and feeding. In the U.S., 40 million acres of land is devoted to turfgrass and more than $30 billion is spent annually on lawn maintenance (Ref.). But these lawns cost more than just money --- they have ecological and environmental costs that are belied by the fact that lawns are the color green.
A typical lawn like this looks like pure leisure. However, usually it requires the input of a lot of energy, effort, and expense.
Besides the aesthetics of green lawns, this care and feeding entails a hidden impact to our environment: the use of fossil fuels and chemicals, the loss of ecosystem services and biodiversity, and our lawn care equipment generates substantive outputs of emissions that affect climate change.
For example, a typical small (4 HP) gasoline-powered lawnmower produces as much smog-forming hydrocarbons in one hour as is produced by driving an average car almost 200 miles under average conditions; gasoline-powered chainsaws, grass blowers, and string trimmers pollute even more than lawnmowers. (Ref.).
Lawn maintenance usually involves the use of non-renewable energy for equipment and water delivery. The National Wildlife Federation estimates that about 30% of the water consumed in the Eastern U.S. and 60% of water consumed in the West is used for watering lawns.
An average suburban lawn receives approximately 10 times as much chemical pesticides per acre as production farmland does; when one adds fertilizer use to the tally, it comes to a total of 70 million tons applied annually to residential lawns. The effect of these pesticide applications on earthworms, which are important to soil function, is devastating: 60-90% of earthworms are killed in areas where pesticides are used. Additionally, the runoff from the chemicals affect our water quality and about 18% of our solid wastes in landfills is yard waste. These sobering statistics beg the question: ''Are our beautiful green lawns an environmental anachronism?''
"TruGreen ChemLawn's lawn treatment destroys weeds, kills pests and can give you the greenest lawn on the block."
This advertisement typifies the marketing of the "dream lawn" for homeowners across the nation. The ads neglect to mention that much of what you put on your lawn can end up in our water.
One can see that how we manage our green spaces at home or elsewhere will impact our environment in the short- and long-term.
Because here at Ithaca College we are working towards improving our awareness of the sustainability of our practices across our operations, we have also integrated sustainability issues in our curriculum. We have therefore implemented a practical research project that examines how we can make our landscaping practices more environmentally sustainable. Specifically, we wanted to learn about the environmental and economic costs and benefits of non-turf grass areas in places where a typical lawn may not be needed (e.g. steep slopes or little used areas of campus). In some areas, for example, having a native grass and wildflower meadow or seating area may be more appropriate from both an aesthetic and environmental perspective.
To learn more about the environmental costs of lawns, visit this page. The links on the right will guide you to the various sections related to lawns at this web site as well as to information about Ithaca College's own project in Alternative Landscaping.
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