Brill's push mower.
Pushing a manual reel mower can feel like a shoving match. Noisy, stinky, gas-powered lawnmowers are notorious for belching impressive volumes of small particulates, volatile organic compounds and other pollutants. Electrics? Either the battery life is too short and recharge time too long, or you have to avoid mowing over the cord.
The downsides of lawnmowers sometimes outweigh their utility to a degree that you may find yourself a) checking Isthmus classifieds for a classic European scythe; b) hiring a neighborhood kid who is both conscientious and industrious; or c) upon discovering that no such creature exists, retaining a professional lawn service.
There may yet be hope. Indeed, lawnmower dissatisfaction is an undeniable spur to innovation. Recent years have seen the introduction of models powered by the same propane canisters you use in camp stoves. They reduce mower-generated greenhouse gas emissions by about one-fourth compared to gasoline-fueled models, and carbon monoxide emissions by more than half, while doing away with fuel spills and flooded engines.
Old two-stroke engines - which cough out enough carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides and other pollutants to rank as a significant source of air pollution, according to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency studies - are yielding to a predominance of more efficient four-stroke engines and tighter emission standards.
And improvements to electric mowers are helping them find a niche between the virtue of manual reel mowers and the performance capacities and features of gasoline mowers. Though their ties to the grid don't eliminate their carbon footprint, they produce no direct exhaust, are quieter, cost less to use, are not as miserable to push as many reel-style manual mowers, and come with features and performance capacities approaching many gas-powered models.
Peter Taglia, staff scientist for Clean Wisconsin, is among the electric-mower converts. "Push mowers are obviously a super-friendly choice" at the virtuous end of the green scale, he allows, but his yard is riddled with twigs, which are more problematic for manual than powered mowers. Electric mowers are "a ton cleaner" than gas mowers, he adds.
His is a plug-in model manufactured by Earthwise. "I've had mine now for two years," he says. Maintenance is a snap: "All you have to do is sharpen the blades once a year."
Taglia notes that his father lives on a quarter-acre lot, which might be about the maximum suited to a battery-powered cordless model. His own corded model suits his much smaller lawn of about 1,000 square feet. "I'm trying to make it smaller," he adds, giving some of it over to perennials and native species. "I have a rain garden that has all native plants, and that is good for taking water off my roof."
Taglia recognizes that manual and electric mowers may not be a practical option for people with sprawling lawns. If you can't live without a gas-powered mower, he advises, ditch your old one for a new model. The old two-stroke engines are "horrendous" polluters, he notes, for their emission of volatile organic compounds and small particulates. "A newer engine is going to be orders of magnitude cleaner."
Cordless battery technology is spreading to smaller powered garden tools, he adds, cutting into the predominance of gasoline-powered mowers.
Even Madison Gas & Electric has staked out a position on lawnmowers, devoting a page on its website to the topic. Among the tidbits: "Mowing your lawn for one hour with a conventional gasoline-powered lawnmower can cause more air pollution than driving from Madison to Chicago in a new car." It also cites U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 7% of volatile organic compound emissions in southeast Wisconsin during the summer are attributable to lawn and garden equipment. VOCs, it goes on to explain, contribute to ozone and smog that can trigger asthma episodes and air-quality alerts like the recent one across southern Wisconsin.
The MGE page touts the virtues of manual mowers (inexpensive, quiet, easy to maintain and well suited to small lawns). Notwithstanding the utility's enlightened self-interest in selling electricity, it also touts electric mowers for small and medium lawns (easy push-button startups, about half the noise of gasoline mowers, no direct exhaust, at a cost of about $5 per year for electricity).
Electric and manual models remain impractical for some mowing situations, however.
Kurt Schneider maintains the mowers used by the Friends of Troy Gardens. "Until I started helping cut my mother-in-law's yard five or six years ago, I never used a power mower in my life," he says. When he started at Troy, the fleet amounted to one two-stroke mower and a rototiller. But he had studied small engines at MATC, proved adept at soliciting mower donations to Troy, and set about fixing them up, improving their efficiency and keeping them tuned.
Now, they're all four-stroke mowers. "Much cleaner than a two-stroke engine," Schneidere says, "by 100%." He favors Hondas: "They're really good. When you start them up, they sound more like a Porsche than a Ford or a Chevy."
Schneider notes that the mowers are used to groom the gardens' paths, perimeter and other common areas. "We have too much acreage to use push mowers," he says. "We try to keep mowing to a minimum, but we need to make it welcoming."
At home, Schneider says, "I have a push mower, but my lawn is 500 square feet at best." Manufactured by Brill, his manual reel model, "from my experience, is great," he says. "It's lightweight. It cuts well. It's pretty durable."
The wave of the future, Schneider believes, is the electric mower. Though they can sometimes be underpowered or have cord problems, he contends, "they're getting better and better."
At the root of these mowing options and quandaries is the lawn itself. Evolved across centuries from grazed European pasturelands to their elaborate Tudor and Elizabethan refinement to their existence as a central feature of countless parks and other recreational commons, contemporary residential lawns have become a ubiquitous artificial construct. They're expressions of urban-suburban conformity in small, private, high-maintenance monocultural tracts that consume vast quantities of water and other resources while displacing indigenous flora.
The revenge of the lawn is that no matter which mower you choose, fossil fuels are consumed in its production and delivery to your door. You'll still have to maintain it, keep its blades sharp, keep its cutting level adjusted to the height recommended for healthy lawns, and mow often enough to avoid trimming too much and shocking the grass.
From that perspective, the best lawnmower option may be no mower at all - converting your lawn back to native floral species that once thrived in what is now your yard until an invasive species arrived with its grass seed and scythes.
