Grow Clean Air

Let’s Clear the Air Together

 
October 2022. By Cassy Aoyagi: People tend to want to do something, and we want to see our results. I have that bias, yet sometimes the best way to grow something is to simply do less. It’s that way with our hardest to see result: growing clean air.

As conversations with Resilient Palisades inspired us to more deeply examine our impact on air quality, we realized that we measure only those things we actively do with clean air in mind. We engaged the California Air Resources Board to become its first and only Zero Emissions Landscaper operating throughout LA County. This too is a measure of what we’ve done – swapping out electric for gas powered equipment. As gas powered landscape equipment emissions are unregulated, this has a profound, measurable impact on general air quality, as well as on your health and that of our team.

A real transformation in our perspective came as our work with The Reverence Project and USGBC-LA led us to take the Coalition for Clean Air’s Clean Air Pledge. Examining our work more fully gave us a new lens through which to see our results – and yours. Here is what we learned.
 
 

 

Growing Gardens Grows Clean Air

Nature grows clean air. Nature heals polluted air. Of course we know this! Yet, we are so accustomed to speaking to the extraordinary damage the landscape industry’s over-mechanized processes can do, these fundamental truths fell into our blindspot when we examined our own impacts. As we look at the big picture, we see we:

Preserve Trees: With each tree we’ve preserved (and we’ve fought for so many), we’ve preserved 260 lbs of oxygen each year. An established tree can also clear as much as 48 lbs of carbon dioxide from the air and also removes substandital VOCs. Simply allowing these guardians of clean air to exist produces powerful, enduring benefits.

Plant Trees: We tend to think of the action of planting a tree, yet those trees do a lot of air cleaning as they grow! Compound interest on clean air! After 25 years in business, roughly 80 percent of the trees we’ve planted are now established. For every 7-8 trees we’ve planted, we’ve grown the oxygen needed to support 2 Angelenos (of the human variety). How many is that? Hmmmm…. stay tuned. We are still counting “our” trees! We know 4 will be supported each year by just the Survivor’s Healing Garden we helped plant this weekend.

Plant Native Foliage: We plant native foliage for year round beauty, to expand habitat, to save water, to defend from wildfire – yet this decision also grows clean air. It means we need no toxic chemical fertilizers, insecticides or pesticides to thrive – and no greenhouse grown (and therefore greenhouse gas producing) annual foliage. As this native foliage tends to be larger than traditional plantings, it also provides more oxygen.

Plant + Harvest Edibles: Yes, providing edibles steps from the kitchen saves trips to the grocery store. It also eliminates even more pesticides and fertilizers and all the big-truck transportation involved in getting herbs and veggies to the grocery store.

Compost: We compost all garden green waste, either on or offsite. It means we always have access to clean, organic material and supports our commitment to all-organic support materials. It also reduces methane production that comes from degrading organic materials in landfills.
 
 
 

 

Growing Attention to Nature Grows Clean Air

Defend from Wildfire: Wildfires have an outsized impact on air quality, especially when they burn homes and man-made materials. As we encourage Angelenos to harden homes and defensively maintain their spaces, we reduce the chances wildfire smoke will contain the most health-damaging particles. The removal of fire-bomb palms and arson grasses further protects our protective, established forests and chaparral that eat carbon and grow oxygen.

Make Room for Nature: As we work with the building and planning professions, we often petition for more space. Setbacks from the street for a little greenway. Unpaved parkways for trees. Playgrounds free of synthetic grass and astroturf.

Minimize + Re-Use Hardscape: Once we find space, we continue to make room for air cleaning nature. We minimize hardscapes and upcycle hardscape materials. These simple preferences also improve fire defense, reduce waste, eliminate truck-trips associated with dump visits and acquiring new materials, and reduce our introduction of fine particles created when mixing concrete.
 
 
 

 

Growing Operational Excellence Grows Clean Air

Growing clean air can make great business sense too! We can credit the pandemic and our team’s ongoing efforts to hone our operations and protect public health with even more clean air benefits. We grow clean air as we:

Consult Online: In bringing our design process as online as possible, we learned we could actually be more effective. Not only do we reach more people, we can see into areas of the garden we may have missed in a walk-through, and we gain a ready reference to client wishes and the state of the garden as we design. This one decision has saved us more than 300 trips and roughly 15,000 miles.

Re-route Trips: We periodically change our routing, sometimes reconfiguring our schedules with clients. This means our teams spend more time in our gardens and less time on the roads. We estimate that each mile we shave off our travel reduces our carbon production by about 20lbs.

Give Commute Options: In 2020, we needed to reconfigure our teams’ transit options to ensure their safety. At times, team members have ridden bikes to our sites. We now arrange ride-share to and from our offices and sites.
 
 

Grow Clean Air with Us!

We hope you found this look into the unseen as helpful as we have. We know understanding this impact makes our team proud. Now that we’ve all taken the Clean Air Pledge, we are all on the lookout for ways to further improve our impacts! We hope this makes our clients proud to be in team with us, as these results could not be done without your patience, trust and own commitments. If you are a fellow landscaper or builder, we hope this gives you pride in your impact – or maybe makes “going green” look less intimidating! In saving LA’s air, we can save our health, our bottom lines, and so much more!
 
 

Sources and Resources