Many parts of Southern California are known for having very green lawns, despite how large they are or how much they cost to maintain. A new study from researchers at the University of California-Irvine found that the emissions generated by lawn maintenance are too much for the grass lawns to off set by absorbing the carbon dioxide. Keeping the lawns looking green, clean, and healthy takes a lot of time and effort, typically involving emission producing maintenance tools. Things like mowers and leaf blowers output far more emission than a simple green lawn can combat, which is an interesting find as most people only think about how the green grass supports the environment. If you think about all of the lawns at people’s homes, in addition to lawns at large parks and public places, it adds up to a significant amount of lawn maintenance.

Using fuel-powered tools like lawn mowers and leaf blowers produce carbon that is not necessary, if alternative methods are used. The study recommends that more manual methods might be key to this problem, but another thing to consider are things like electric riding lawn mowers. Having an electric powered motor on a lawn mower, similar to an electric car, might be a big help to those large areas of grass which need maintenance. As California becomes more green, and focused on protecting the environment, it will be interesting to see how they might address this lawn issue on a larger scale. This study at the University of California-Irvine was supported by the Kearney Foundation of Soil Science and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Tags: california news, uc irvine

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 2:10 pm and is filed under California Universities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.