Stopping the Waste Cycle Hurting Us All

My plug-in mower can be a hassle, but it will outlast both a gas and rechargeable mower and is the best option aside from either not mowing or using a reel mower or scythe. While a good reel mower or scythe might last a lifetime, any power mower currently made is mostly an unrecyclable amalgam similar to most "high tech" products in our daily life. It wouldn't have to be that way if Extended Producer Responsibility was the norm.

 I installed a drip irrigation system around our house in hopes that I will be able to grow some sunflowers and hollyhocks along the west side to both look nice and to take the edge off the blasting summer sun that roasts the house much of the summer. On a trip to the local Ace Hardware to pick up a part, the guy in front of me in line was purchasing a self-propelled rechargeable electric mower for about 600 dollars. I balked at the price, since I've paid less than 200 for every mower I've ever owned, but even a modest gas-powered mower is over a few hundred dollars now. My old plug-in electric will likely keep doing its job for years to come, so I see no need to replace it. Also, what are the ethics of purchasing something new and devoting so much energy (and money) to maintaining something that is a net negative for the planet when it could be a net positive? The American lawn is an ecological nightmare on many levels, the machines used to maintain it are just one of them.

As I write, Williston has an air quality index of about 218 as smoke comes down from fires burning far to the north in Canada. My lawn is connected to fires in Canada by the sheer amount of carbon dioxide maintaining it produces. It produces nothing and is good habitat for only a small number of human habituated creatures. Better to be garden space or more diverse and natural green space if it wasn't such a part of our unique American value system.

The flare I call the Eye of Sauron just a mile south of our house. I call it such, because on cloudy nights it lights up the sky like the fires of Mordor in the Lord of the Rings. It has been burning on and off for as long as I've lived in Williston. The waste stream that produced the 600-dollar mower starts right here at this oil well.

I look at my front lawn that I've been watering with a sprinkler with mixed feelings. It is a little raggedy and is in need of a good mowing, unless of course I wanted to get on the "Let it Bloom in June" bandwagon and let it grow. My neighbors might complain. Meanwhile, my unwatered backyard will go another week before it needs mowing. I discovered that not having a lush lawn also means no mosquitos, so that is a better option in my opinion. I keep the front yard watered to satisfy the social conformity of the neighborhood, which in the end is mostly what lawns are about anyway. There are lawns that actually get used and that is great, but the vast majority, like ours, are just for looks.

World War Two conservation, recycling and repurposing provides a powerful example from the past that can be a starting point for changing our society quickly and in unprecedented ways. Courtesy, Library of Congress.

Back to the 600-dollar (push) mower. That mower was produced with mostly virgin materials mined and manufactured in toxic corners of the planet that I and the unlucky buyer are mostly insulated from in our middle-class American redoubts that depend on other places being polluted so we can have new stuff. If we truly had a "Cradle to Cradle" society such as that proposed in the eponymous book over two decades ago, the story might be different. If our waste streams could be effectively deconstructed to become resources for new manufacturing (like the figure below), we could make a case for a consumer economy, but in its current state we are being buried in our own waste as it fills our bodies and our oceans. 

We only have to look out our windows to get peek of the natural gas flares that dot Williston to see a small segment of the waste stream that this mower produces just to be born. Fossil fuels, and in the case of flares, wasted fossil fuels are where it all begins. Waste begins even before energy is ever used to make a mower. He may be buying an electric mower, but its production still relies heavily on fossil fuels that I can see being burned off every day at the beginning of a long planet killing waste stream that ends with a new mower for middle-class Americans.

How things should be. Creative Commons via Wikipedia

Over the mower's life, it will maintain the absurd and quixotic cycle of watering and putting (fossil fuel) fertilizer and chemicals onto grass, not to grow food or provide animal habitat or store carbon, but to cause grass to grow faster so it has to be cut more often in an ever-repeating cycle. In a decade, that new mower will be a pile of mostly unrecyclable waste in a landfill or some developing country. What if that same mower could be deconstructed to make a new mower? What is needed is legislation that will impose EPR or Extended Producer Responsibility. EPR would force producers to think about the ability to reuse, repair and deconstruct their products. EPR is a lever to force producers to think about what the end of life for their product will be and that could change everything.