For Clean Air and a Clean Chesapeake, Electrify Lawn Care

By HARRY CAMPBELL, DOUG MYERS, JOSEPH WOOD

There’s a good chance, if you use a gas-powered lawn mower, that maintaining your lawn is worse for the environment than your morning commute. In some cases, far worse.

Running a typical gas mower for one hour creates roughly the same amount of smog-forming air pollution as driving a passenger car 300 miles, according to the California Air Resources Board. In the case of some gas-powered leaf blowers, an hour’s worth of use is equivalent to driving 1,100 miles.

All told, say the authors of a 2021 study published in the International Journal of...