Just wondering whether cutting the lawns once a week is C0 positive or negative, i.e. does the Honda (tenous motoring link) produce more CO2 in the time to cut the grass than the grass has produced CO over the preceding week?
Wonder what the BiK is on a 32" Mountfield? ;-)
No seriously, anyone have any ideas as to how much CO2 a sq/m of grass can convert in a week?
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I would have thought (from my long forgotten O Level in Biology) that grass actually absorbed CO2 and converted it to O2 - so according to our dear leaders and the Thought Police it's probably going to
be a criminal offence to mow the lawn before long.
and laws were most numerous when the commonwealth was most corrupt. Tacitus, Annals
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I would have thought (from my long forgotten O Level in Biology) that grass actually absorbed CO2 and converted it to O2 - so according to our dear leaders and the Thought Police it's probably going to be a criminal offence to mow the lawn before long.
Cutting the grass takes away the Carbon the plant has built up, which encourages it to build more, thereby taking up more CO2, not less.
Have you not noticed that a regularly-mown lawn grows more rapidly than one that's left to grow for a bit?
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Never thought of that, gad what's the world come to eh !
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Cutting the grass takes away the Carbon the plant has built up which encourages it to build more thereby taking up more CO2 not less.
Won't it be released when it rots?
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Won't it be released when it rots?
Some of it, although a lot will just return to the soil as nutrients for the next batch.
It's like the old nonsense about recycled paper. Most of the world's paper supplies come from Canada and Finland, where millions of acres of pine forest are cut down, and more planted, each year.
The CO2 is being stored in the paper.
So why recycle? It's not as if paper comes from mahogany or anything is it?
By all means recycle plastics, glass, metal etc but wood and paper just aren't necessary. Won't do any harm to let it rot in landfill, and the extra chemicals needed to make recycled pulp usable again means that recycled paper actually harms the environment.
Similar story with biodiesel (palm oil) which we've mentioned on here before. Some of the stuff the environmentalists come out with is totally bogus and counter-productive, and gets in the way of the good work a lot of them are doing.
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I would have thought (from my long forgotten O Level in Biology) that grass actually absorbed CO2 and converted it to O2 >>
That is what I am thinking though how much say per sqm per week?
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I'm more interested in whether our 240 litre green waste bin will be able to cope with a fortnightly collection. At the rate our grass is growing at the moment it looks as if it might be a bit borderline.
--
L\'escargot.
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According to this article from NASA's Earth Observatory, well kept lawns are a carbon sink. It is most efficient to leave the clippings on the surface as the grass absorbs carbon faster than the decomposing grass releases it. Next best is composting. Very bad is chucking it in a landfill.
The article includes a graph which more or less answers your question:
earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/Lawn/lawn3.html
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Motoring discussion please, or this one gets locked. DD.
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Just wondering about the 300 or 400 approx sqm of lawn being an offset for the Mondeo, Clio and Kawasaki as well as the Honda mower.
Or otherwise re HIPS offsetting the C02 the house produces.
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I think the argument turns more on the poluting or co2 generating aspects of lawnmower engines. There have been moves to bring try and bring their emissions down to levels more comparable with vehicle engines, but the snag is that fuel injection, electronic control, lean burn, etc are expensive and possibly less effective on a small engine. Also there is the relativity point - the annual mileage of a lawnmower is negligible compared with a car's.
The point may have greater validity on the large scale - golf courses, municipal parks, etc, where full size vehicles like tractors are used. And finally of course the possible effect of climate change, but the certainty of water shortages, call into question the environmental desirability of trying to maintain lawns at all.
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"it's probably going to be a criminal offence to mow the lawn before long"
Gardeners' Question Time on R4 announced recently that MOT's (motoring link) would soon be required for petrol mowers. Happily, this was on April 1st, but the worrying thing was how believable it sounded. A lot of people wrote in...
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Didn't Saab run an ad a while back saying that the then latest model produced less noxious stuff in coast-to-coast USA trip than a lawnmower used for X hours?
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