A Sustainable Train of Thought

I’ve spent plenty of time in my youth mowing lawns, and I always found electric lawnmowers rather odd. Partly because of the potential to mow over your extension cord, which didn’t seem too safe to me, and partly because I always had trouble taking them seriously.

To mow a lawn you need a motor, and motors on lawnmowers should be loud and smelly. Electric lawnmowers sounded at most like a swarm of angry bees buzzing about. Lawnmowers should also be heavy and made of metal—I’ve seen what the professionals use (those riding lawnmowers) and they’re never electric or plastic. As far as I could tell, electric lawnmowers were always made of plastic and thus just came across as more toy than tool.

I suppose you could apply similar logic to the perception of electric cars versus gasoline-powered cars. But that’s another story, and I’m writing this post because of an email I received from Amazon.com today, touting “Eco-Friendly Cordless Lawn Care Tools”. Naturally, I was intrigued, if not a little skeptical. The one part which jumped out at me:

As a valued Amazon.com customer interested in the environment, you might be interested in zero-emission electric trimmers and edgers. Best of all, you never have to hassle with oil and gas again.

If that’s not an abuse of the word “zero emissions” then I don’t know what is. Perhaps if you apply the term to the specific point of use, then yes, physically the object isn’t emitting anything. But that electricity powering the tool is coming from somewhere, and emissions were certainly involved in creating the plastics and components of the tools, their assembly, and their transportation and delivery.

Now, I know that small engines like lawnmowers and snowmobiles and so forth are actually pretty bad in terms of emissions, mainly because they’re not as regulated as vehicle engines. So in that sense I can see how it would be better to use electric lawn-care equipment. But something bothers me about the claim of “zero emissions” and I think it’s the cavalier omission of time in that statement.

Maybe I’m just more tuned into this kind of analysis because of my thesis work and general frame of mind, but then again language usage is really important and we really need to be clear on what exactly we’re talking about when we use terms like “zero emissions”.

A silly, simple solution would be to plant trees to cover the amount of lifetime emissions associated with the creation and use of the lawnmower. Better still would be a redesign which systemically eliminates emissions from the production, delivery, use, and disposal phases.