This is not new info, but grass lawns are a
detriment to the environment as a whole:
"According to the EPA, we use 580 million gallons of gas each year, in lawnmowers that emit as much pollution in one hour as 40 automobiles driving— accounting for roughly 10 to 18 percent of non-road gasoline emissions.
We also dump roughly 10 times more fertilizer on our lawns than on crops, notes Columbia’s Earth Institute. These fertilizers and the 67 million pounds of pesticides with which we drench our lawns ever year degrade, releasing compounds like nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 298 times more potent than CO2. Potential damages from agricultural fertilizer runoff alone were estimated by one study to cost $157 billion annually.
We’ve managed to make grass do the opposite of what photosynthesis is supposed to accomplish. A recent study out of Appalachian State University pegs our lawns’ carbon footprint at around 25 million tons annually.
It gets better. All America’s farmland consumes 88.5 million acre feet of water a year. Lawns, with a fraction of the land, drink an estimated two-thirds as much. Most municipalities use 30-60 percent of drinkable water on lawns."