Landscape Consumption - Boulder, Colorado
Jan 21st, 2008 by urbanoasisdesign
Take a closer look into our landscape consumption of gasoline and water both nationally, and here in Boulder. How can we make better use of our resources? How can your landscape design help decrease Boulder’s consumptive footprint?
- Mowing
- Yale University has estimated that the U.S. uses more than 600,000,000 gallons of gas to mow and trim lawns each year, or about two gallons of gas for every man, woman and child, or five gallons per household. Mowers also consume additional engine oil in their crankcases and two-stroke mowers consume oil in their fuel.
- Watering
- According to a California study, in many areas (especially in the West where water must be moved great distances from reservoirs) the amount of fuel needed to pump the water is at least equal to the fuel used in mowing.
- Fertilizing
- Creating synthetic nitrogen requires the heating of natural gas to combine atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen into ammonia. The amount of natural gas required to make approximately 200 bags of lawn fertilizer would heat your home for a year. Each 40-pound bag contains the fossil fuel equivalent of approximately 2.5 gallons of gasoline. Transporting these bags of fertilizer from the factory and two your home requires additional fuel.
- Cleanup
- Power blowers, brooms and rakes also use fuel. Additional resources are consumed when yard wastes are removed to the landfill or incinerator.
Apply these numbers to Boulder’s population (101,547) and you have 203,094 gallons of gas annually used on residential sod alone. As for water, assuming irrigation water in 2007 made up 57.2% of Boulder’s annual household water use; Boulder used 1,740,946,420 gallons on irrigation (not counting commercial irrigation).
The above information only taps the carbon and water consumption problem. Well manicured lawns have increased fertilizer, herbicide and pesticide runoff for eutrification and toxification of our riparian areas.
The solution to this problem may seem simple - stop growing lawns and put in plants that don’t need water, mowing, fertilizer, etc. This solution that seems simple has underlying reasons for the problem being so complex. If we can answer the question; Why do people grow grass?, perhaps we will be able to see how to stop this consumptive behavior.
Resources
For further exploration and statistics, check out the below websites:
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