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My Not So Green Lawn


 I believe there are few Longboat Key residents who mow their own yards. I am one of them. 

Mostly what I see are numerous lawn service companies mowing yards on a regular basis, regardless of the season and growing conditions.

I estimate there are around five thousand properties on Longboat requiring lawn maintennce, including all our condominium grounds, twice a month, or 10,000 lawn mowings, string trimmings and leaf blowings a month.

A am asking if you believe we can continue caring for our lawns, using gas equipment, without unwanted repercussions? If Longboat Key was the only source of small engine pollution, no problem. Unfortunately there are 130 million homes in America. So the pollution created from lawn care is enormous.

We will talk about fertalizer and noise pollution in future articles.

What can we, as citizens, do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from all the millions of small gas engines, each running hours a day?

So far California is the only state to ban small gas engins. There are more than a hundred municipalities across the country that have banned gas powered leaf blowers, ignoring mower and string trimmer pollution. Mowers run far longer that leaf blowers. I believe that Florida will not enact small gas engine controls any time soon. That leaves only municipalities as agents of  climate change.

There is a Bradenton based lawn care company, eco-lectric, that uses battery powered lawn equipment. There may be others I am not aware of. If I did not already own a battery powered mower, blower and string trimmer, and maintain my own yard, I would call them 941-755-5703.

Since one of the tenets of this blog is to look into a possible role our town might play in reducing global greenhouse emissions, I will list a few actions the town might take to not only reduce pollution, but orgnize our community to be good sheperds of our planet for future generations.

1) hire eco-lectric, or some like company, to maintain all currently contracted lawn areas.
2) purchase a commercial battery powered mower, along with string trimmers and leaf blowers for town maintained lawn areas.
3) reach out to condominium assiciations to also use eco-friendly lawn services.
4) use new federal infrastructure money to replace all town gas powered vehicles. Electrric powered vehicles are less expensive to own and operate than gas powered vehicles.
5) educate and encourage residents to find alternatives to small gas engine lawn maintenance.

 

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