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Synthetic turf can look just as real grass from a few feet away but does it hold water with its new eco claims?

Installing synthetic turf has become all the rage recently. It was even featured on some Bay Area local channels. Commonly known in the past as astro turf, it has been reinvented, repacked and now called ‘eco turf.’ It is being touted as the latest in green landscaping. There is even a striking list of ecological “solutions” that this product addresses. Those include no mowing, no watering or expensive irrigation systems, no weed control, and no other maintenance headaches like fertilizing and hauling away grass clippings.

The latest synthetic turf is even manufactured from recycled plastic and is recycable at the end of its life. Your kids can play on it in the rain and won’t get muddy. It is wheel chair accessible. So it seems like we have solved a horde of environmental issues with one product, so what’s not to love?

Stepford Lawns

Do you recall the part in the movie, The Stepford Wives where one of the Stepford wives gets stabbed and it messes with her wiring and she starts repeating “ I thought we were friends, I thought we were friends? That’s what I imagine synthetic turf is saying when I stab it with my accusations of it being a pseudo green product. Like my friend Owen Dell would say, it’s kind of like organic heroin, organic or not it is still fundamentally a bad idea.

Aromatherapy it’s not

I’ll begin with the deceptively simple argument that my primary distrust of synthetic turf is based on the fact that it is not alive. It does not breathe and therefore it offers no oxygen as a byproduct. On a warm day the entire area around a synthetic playing field reeks of melting off-gassing plastic, not an enjoyable smell. It certainly is not aromatherapy. Again because the stuff is not living and breathing the cooling effect is absent and thus the heat island affect is increased. The ‘heat island’ refers to the phenomena in which urban air and surfaces sustain higher temperatures than nearby rural areas.

The images below comparing air, water, bermudagrass, sand, asphalt, and synthetic turf surface temperatures illustrate how (more…)

Composting can be either an enjoyable or a dreadful experience, can it not?  Personally, being a landscaper I love to play with dirt so to me it’s sort of like playing in sand box – fun!  

Composting is good for the environment and it’s a smart way to put the nutrients back in the ground.  It helps to reduce greenhouse gases by sequestering carbon back into the soil; storing the carbon for plants to use. Sequestering is actually considered by the US Environmental Protection Agency as a carbon ‘sink’, because it takes the carbon (C) out of (CO2), and leaves just the oxygen (O2) to float into the atmosphere. EPA has more info on this if you’d like to read more. 

In our first month of composting at home, my wife and I reduced our trash waste from three 30 gallon bags all the way to one bag. Wow! We now get excited to see how much we can do to reduce our waste. Our worm bin in the garage and the outdoor stackable bin are also put to use and are doing great. 

If you have not tried composting yet then I would like to invite you to consider it. Relax, you really do not need to run out a buy a pound of worms to get started.  There are a few simple ways to ease into it.  

For example, you can begin by (more…)

It’s been official for months now – California again is facing water crisis. Unusually dry and hot weather had eroded our priceless Sierra snowpack, the supply of much of our water.  Our local reservoirs have been low for years now. In addition, water demand in beautiful state is growing each year and our sources of water are drying up.

Climate change models demonstrate that California will become a much drier place in our lifetimes.  Not only precipitation will likely decrease, but our precious Sierra snowpack is expected to shrink and leave of only with 10% of its current capacity.

Even more interesting, according to the California Energy Commission, 20% of our state’s electricity is used for the treatment and pumping of water.  Groundwater pumping has greatly shrunk our underground aquifers.  Parts of the San Joaquin Valley has now seen soil level drop 50’ from the removal of groundwater. Every single river in California has been dammed, wiping out fish populations, including endangered Chinook salmon. Two out of five most endangered rivers in the U.S. are in California. 

Let’s face it; this is not our grandkid’s head ache. Very soon water will become a treasured commodity.  Sadly, you’d never know it by the way we are dumping it down the drain. A traditional home has potable water piped in from a local water supplier. Amazingly, one half of this water is used for irrigation, where potable water is absolutely unnecessary. Almost all the remainder is used for non-potable water needs in the house, where it is then flushed down the drain to our local sewage treatment plant.

Now that sewage plant spends an enormous amount of time, money and energy treating this so called “greywater” like raw sewage.  This makes no sense, does it?

Here are two ways to re-use water already available to us (more…)