This is a belated response to the reader who was concerned about excessive water usage and new water parks in Phoenix. I agree that this might not be the best use of water in prolonged drought years, but let’s look in our own backyards at a huge water hog that affects all beings downstream — bluegrass! Those pretty green oceans of lawn are not sustainable or earth friendly because of their huge need for water and also because they are fossil fuel hogs.
Bluegrass is a cool season grass that thrives in spring and fall but needs 44 inches of water a year, and here we get 8. To make it survive our hot summers it must be irrigated frequently and fertilized with fossil fuel fertilizers. Lawn chemicals are petroleum products that take energy to make and they never disappear. They become water pollutants all the way downstream.
We feed it to keep it green and growing and then — guess what? It needs to be mowed. With a high-polluting lawn mower engine that runs on fossil fuels.
Leaving the clippings on the lawn helps feed the new grass blades. Composting or using the clippings as mulch is good, depending on the chemical load they carry. Dumping the clippings into a single use plastic (fossil fuel) bag and dumping it in the trash makes a stinky mess in the landfill and probably contributes to the methane load in the dump. Hauling it to a composting facility costs money and more... (More)