The picNYC table is your own in-house urban greenspace. Eat, drink, play mini-lawn games: it’s the ultimate multi-use item.

Modern living means few city dwellers are lucky enough to have their own garden with a lawn. So this table, the wittily named picNYC, offers the opportunity for urban gardening – and pastoral dining – without the bugs. Avoid the nagging guilt of failing to mow the lawn; a pair of shears should do the trick. It’s also the perfect finishing touch to haute-tech office spaces.

The table is made from high-end lightweight aluminum and comes installed with grass for deliveries within the NYC area; it costs just shy of $6,000. Okay, those leaves of grass don’t come cheap. Consider it an investment in art, your well-being, horizontal gardening and, above all else, nature.

Photo: Voos Furniture

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In her recent piece in USA Today, Laura Vanderkam takes an environmental stand against the family yard:

“Mowing itself requires fuel, just like our cars, with a similar impact on the environment. And all these woes are before you even get to the issue of water. According to Kress, maintaining non-native plants requires 10,000 gallons of water per year per lawn, over and above rainwater. That water doesn’t just show up by itself; it requires energy to get to your hose. In California, for example, the energy required to treat and move water amounts to 19 percent of total electricity use in the state.”

Vanderkam got me thinking. In her article, she states that maintaining a lawn is one of the most difficult – and therefore potentially environmentally unfriendly – activities one can associate with home ownership.

She interviewed Florida resident Diane Faulkner, who spent some time in Kenya and participated in a daily ritual of waking up at dawn to walk miles along a dried-up river toward a water source, then returning with a few gallons for cooking and washing.

When she returned to America, she asked herself: “How many gallons of water do I waste on that stinking lawn?”

And once the grass has been watered, she wondered, what else goes into keeping it maintained that’s bad for the planet? (Subquestion: How many people own push-mowers anymore, instead of their more convenient relatives, motorized mowers?) While a field of emerald, tailored grass is ubiquitous with owning any sized plot of land, taking care of it is anything but natural.

So, unless you own a sheep, you’re actually doing harm to the environment every time you water and cut the green patches in the front, and backyard. There are 21 million acres of lawn across the country.

In addition to the water waste and exhaust emissions from gas-powered mowers (and don’t even get me started on riding mowers), homeowners use more than 78 million pounds of pesticides each year to keep their front yard “green,” according to Stephen Kress of the National Audubon Society. He also states that weed killers should be banished; simply mowing the lawn removes the tops of weeds and wildflowers, making their stalks virtually undistinguishable from their grassy hosts.

As familiar as the lawn may be when picturing a traditional American neighborhood, think for a moment: What went into putting it there in the first place? Laura Ingalls Wilder aside, the grass was installed on your property, similar to the way your man-made house was. According to Kress, maintaining non-native plants requires 10,000 gallons of water per year per lawn – in addition to rainwater. Then there’s the hose. The water doesn’t flow through it because it wants to – it requires energy to get from pipes to hose. In California, for example, the energy required to treat and move water amounts to 19 percent of total electricity use in the state.

Says the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey, the average father of school-aged kids spends 1.6 hours a week on lawn and garden care – more time than he spends on reading, talking, playing or doing educational activities with his kids combined.

Do you think that politicians should start regulating your lawn?

Some facts:

• Inspectors are deployed to count the square footage of grass vs. wild plants; states are cutting teachers and police officers
• By 2020, California will face a shortfall of fresh water as great as the amount that all of its cities and towns together are consuming today
• By 2025, 1.8 billion”¨ people will live in conditions of absolute “¨water scarcity, and 65 percent of the world’s population will be water stressed
• To grow a ton of wheat, it takes 1,000 tons of water; the U.S is the largest exporter of wheat to the world; when we export a ton of our wheat, we are effectively including 100 tons of water in the bargain
• In the U.S, 21 percent of irrigation is achieved by pumping groundwater at rates that exceed the water’s ability to recharge
• There are 66 golf courses in Palm Springs; on average, they each consume over a million gallons of water per day
• Lake Meade (the source of 95 percent of water for Las Vegas) will be dry in the next 4 to 10 years
• Xeriscaping is a form of landscaping that uses zero water
• You can also turn your yard into a vegetable garden; use dense plantings and heavy mulch to keep the weeds down, and put a drip irrigation on a timer for lower maintenance
• And for lawn jockeys, in Southern California verdolagas (a type of purslane) looks like lawn and will grow with zero or infrequent watering over most places

Then there’s Faulkner. She redid her lawn with rocks and hearty plants such as Confederate Jasmine, arranged to look like an English garden. “I don’t have to mow, I don’t have to water, I don’t have to trim,” she says. Her water bill has gone from $80-$90/month to $20. But then again, you could always just spray paint your lawn, too.

Is the grass always greener, eco-friends? Let us know in the comments.

Image: Matt McGee

The post Who Ever Liked Mowing the Lawn Anyway? appeared first on EcoSalon.

The recovery from the earthquake in Haiti is showing us the value of building our physical world with sustainable reuse of materials, such as re-purposing the rubble from destroyed buildings to mix concrete for new structures.

The good news is we don’t have to rely on earthquakes, floods and fires to inspire our most innovative product designers to bring their concepts to the table. Here are some exciting trends meeting the future demands of a world that is scaling down and greening up.

Light Transmitting Concrete: Shining example of Innovation

Hungarian architect Aron Losonszi’s light-transmitting concrete is a mixture of fine concrete and thousands of tiny optical glass optic fibers, which are blended to filter views and add “weightiness and lightness” at the same time. The new material, Litraconâ„¢, forms an aggregate that is used as building blocks that can be designed in various sizes with embedded heat-isolation. Installations so far have included the Iberville Parish Vets Memorial in Louisiana, the Hungarian Embassy in Paris, two logo walls in Belgium and Hong Kong.

STRAW: The Bale Out That Works

Make hay houses while the sun shines! Resurrecting an age-old method to conserve energy and materials for neo-eco dwellings, the bales are stacked like bricks in the post and beam construction. The biggest concern: keeping moisture out, and experts say this can be accomplished with proper foundation design, roof overhang, plumbing not routed through the bales and installing moisture barriers. For green building tips on building with straw, look here.

EDIBLE GREENS: The Utopian vision of the New Front Lawn

Ask any guerilla gardener. Grass sucks in terms of water use and feeding a healthy world. With that in mind, architect Fritz Haeg’s “radical gardening” of replacing the front lawn with food we grow to eat is spreading now from his original geodesic home in Los Angeles to gardens in New Jersey, Austin, Baltimore, Kansas and elsewhere. As the Whitney Museum points out, his Edible Estates (the book is now in its 2nd edition) are reminiscent of the World War II Victory gardens with results that can be appreciated by an entire community. Go to his YouTube video and get inspired to tear out your green carpet.

CORN: High Starch, low emissions Floor Fiber

Roll out the barrel, of corn that is. Using starch’s sugar to make a new plastic for carpet offers these advantages: reduced CO2 emissions, stain-protection and biodegradable in landfills. Leading the way is Mohawk’s Smartstrand with Bio-PDO, a renewable sourced polymer which is said to require 30 percent less energy than nylon to produce along with 65 percent reduced greenhouse emissions. Another company, CornCarpet, boasts of its exceptional softness. If you must use carpet, which is not the best choice for allergies, at least corn sugar offers a better option – and a new direction that seems to be the innovator in carpet design for 2010.

RECLAIMED FABRICS: Out with the Old, in with the Old. It’s what’s new

While Knoll and other design institutions continuing their commitment to producing green certified modern textiles, sources like Modern Fabrics are launching online retailing of the best designed textiles of yore (Pollack, Pearson, Knoll, Kravet, Jhane Barnes to name a few) that once would constitute waste on the workroom floor. Instead of these to-the-trade treasures being packed up in black trash bags headed for the dump, these sources are courting designers and consumers trying to garner great upholstery for a good price (50 to 70 percent off list prices) while reducing waste. Soy, bio organic cotton and milk-based cotton may be hot in production but reclaimed is the coolest trend of all. It’s a kind of forever love the design world cannot pass up.

Images by: Jeremy Levine Design, colros, woodleywonderworks, kevindooley

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