Go Carbon Negative With Sun Prairie Lawn and Landscape!
Sun Prairie Lawn and Landscape only offers carbon negative services to our customers. Our aim is to help benefit the environment through our work! Between our lawn care, landscaping, & snow removal services, our team helps reduce carbon emissions during every season! Unfortunately maintaining our lawns and landscapes is responsible for some significant greenhouse gas emissions. Although gas powered lawn equipment is an obvious source of greenhouse gases, landscape creation is also a significant contributor. Thankfully, we are able to overcome these issue using efficient equipment and certified carbon offsets.
Carbon Offsets
First and foremost, our team uses verified carbon offsets to eliminate our carbon footprint. Carbon offsets take carbon from the air or prevent carbon from being emitted through alternate practices. These offsets are purchased by companies like Sun Prairie Lawn and Landscape that are seeking to reduce or eliminate their carbon footprint.
In the case of Sun Prairie Lawn and Landscape, our team removes 2 metric tons of carbon for each we produce. This means for every 110 gallons of gas we use, which emits 1 metric ton of carbon dioxide, we offset 220 gallons of gas or 2 metric tons. This helps us not only eliminate our carbon footprint, but actually maintain our carbon negativity.
By choosing Sun Prairie Lawn and Landscape, you can rest easy knowing your dollars are being used to invest in keeping our environment clean for generations to come. Some of the projects we invest in with our carbon offset spending include: landfill methane capture, wind energy, anaerobic digesters for farm waste, direct air carbon capture.
Efficient Equipment
Our team utilizes efficient equipment to reduce our carbon footprint as much as possible before utilizing carbon offsets. We use zero turn mowers, which are significantly more efficient than residential push mowers. Using this equipment allows us to mow lawns more quickly, which prevents additional carbon release.
Although we don’t currently utilize propane powered mowers, our plan is to convert our mowing equipment to propane by the end of the 2025 season! This is because propane doesn’t release sulfur dioxide, methane, or nitrogen oxides. This will help us not only reduce our carbon footprint, but helps us keep our air clean!
Overall, our equipment is significantly more efficient than typical residential mowers. If you are interested in making your yard carbon negative, be sure to contact Sun Prairie Lawn and Landscape to learn how we can help you!
Frequently Asked Questions
The environment is a complicated topic, and many things that appear to be environmentally friendly actually don’t solve the problem. To make more information available for you, here are the answers to some of the frequently asked questions we receive.
Why don't you use electric mowers?
This is a great questions and something we took a great deal of time to consider before making our decision to use gas mowers. Although battery powered mowers seem more environmentally friendly on the surface, there are some significant drawbacks to their use.
First, producing the batteries for electric mowing equipment has a significant environmental impact. In fact, a simple 13KwH battery emits approximately a metric ton of carbon during the production process. Besides carbon being released, there are significant environmental impacts from lithium mining including freshwater salinisation. Lastly, when those batteries die (approximately 3-5 years) they need to be disposed of. Even proper battery recycling has significant environmental consequences that are hard to overcome.
Besides the environmental issues related to producing batteries, there is also the matter of charging them. Unfortunately we currently only produce 18.9% of the United State’s electricity from renewable energy. Although electric motors don’t emit carbon directly, charging them uses electricity produced with fossil fuels. Therefore, battery powered mowers aren’t truly carbon negative.
In addition, battery powered commercial mowers are still early in their development. Currently available commercial electric mowers are significantly more expensive than conventional commercial mowers. Therefore, our team decide to use conventional mowers in order to make our services more affordable. By keeping our services price competitive we can serve more customers, which ultimately results in more carbon being offset or removed from the atmosphere. Since our teams goal is to offset double the carbon we produce, serving more customers is the best thing we can do to help the environment.
All in all, there are a number of reason we decided to utilize conventional mowers instead of electric mowers. From price constraints to hidden environmental costs, electric mowers aren’t necessarily the best solution to confront the environmental issues with the lawn care industry.
Isn't the traditional American lawn bad for the environment?
Although there is a lot of news coverage on the environmental consequences of maintaining a lawn, there are also some serious environmental benefits such as carbon sequestration, improved soil structure, and improved stormwater management. The main downside is the carbon emissions from lawn equipment used to maintain the grass. Since our team offsets more carbon than we produce, that eliminates the main environmental issue caused by the typical American lawn.
Does landscaping really have a carbon footprint?
Many homeowners have started to make the switch from a traditional lawn to installed landscapes to reduce their carbon footprint. However, many landscapes still contribute a significant amount of carbon through their installation and maintenance.
Although it isn’t commonly known, there is actually more carbon sequestered in our soils than our atmosphere and living plants combined. Maintaining soil structure and integrity is essential to reducing our carbon footprint. Tilling soil alone releases significant amounts of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, & methane.
To overcome these issues, our team aims to provide less invasive landscape installation that reduces or prevents tillage. We also purchase additional carbon offsets to overcome these emissions where they can’t be avoided. If you are interested in replacing portions of your yard with sustainable landscaping, be sure to reach out to learn more.
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