This article was originally published by The Tennessean on January 9, 2023: Opinion: why grass lawns are bad for the environment and your wallet.
In Nashville, lush green lawns are everywhere. Stretching before the State Capitol, surrounding the Parthenon, outlining neighborhoods, these expansive green monsters are contributing to global warming and hurting our planet. This summer, Nashvillians experienced record-breaking heat; temperatures rose to triple digits for the first time in nearly a decade, according to an article by the Nashville Scene (Herner). Maintaining grass lawns increases greenhouse gases, pollutes ecosystems, wastes water, and diminishes biodiversity. Grass lawns are expensive, unsustainable, and poor investments.
While more environmentally friendly than pavement, grass lawns and their upkeep come with heavy carbon costs. Lawn mowers, irrigation systems, and fertilizers add to households’ carbon footprint. An article by paleBLUEdot says that running a gas-powered lawn mower for one hour produces eleven times more emissions than running the average new car for the same duration (Redmond). The production and distribution of lawn chemicals and water used for irrigation purposes adds even more CO2 to the atmosphere. Grass lawns do remove some atmospheric CO2, through the act of carbon sequestration, omitting oxygen back into the air (Milesi et al. 4). However, a University of California-Irvine study found that the total estimate for greenhouse gas emissions due to lawn care is four times larger than the amount of carbon sequestered by grass (Grass Lawns are an ecological catastrophe).