Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
The New York Times

May 5, 2004 Wednesday
Late Edition - Final


HEADLINE: To Cut Smog, Los Angeles Places a Bounty on Mowers
BYLINE: By BEN BERGMAN
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES, May 4

In the smog capital of the nation, it seems that no effort to reduce pollution is too small.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District, which sets emission rules for the Los Angeles basin, announced a program on Tuesday to take 4,000 soot-belching gasoline mowers off Los Angeles lawns.

Angelenos who turn in their old gasoline mowers will get a $300 credit toward the purchase of a shiny new $400 electric mower.

"This is the best deal in Southern California," said William A. Burke, chairman of the board of the air quality agency.

Gas mowers and other gas-powered lawn equipment are frequently powered by antiquated engines that produce much more pollution than newer cars that have sophisticated computers and engines to comply with the state's emissions standards.

One typical gas-powered lawn mower pollutes as much in one year as 43 new cars, each driven more than 12,000 miles annually, according to the air quality agency. It says that retiring 4,000 gas-powered mowers would reduce pollution by nearly 20 tons annually, which is more than is generated by all oil refineries in the Los Angeles area in a two-day period.

Gas mowers redeemed through the program will be destroyed.

Jim Parkinson of Westlake Village, Calif., watched as the gas-powered mower that has trimmed his lawn for the last 37 years easily flattened into a pancake of scrap metal at a demonstration sponsored by the air quality board on Tuesday.

He did not seem nostalgic. "The mower stinks," Mr. Parkinson said. "It uses gas. It smokes. It's kind of worn out."

Bill Becker, executive director of the Association of Local Air Pollution Control Officials, said that with Los Angeles having undertaken traditional antipollution measures, other steps now need to be tried.

"Los Angeles has plucked the low-hanging fruit and what remains are the less-traditional strategies," Mr. Becker said.

He asserted that Los Angeles had done more to reduce pollution than any other city in the country and perhaps the world.

Jerry Martin, a spokesman for the California Air Resources Board, said: "Los Angeles is head and shoulders above the rest of the nation in the peaks of pollution and the consequences. Any effort to control pollution is welcome and quite frankly needed."

Similar lawn mower buybacks have taken place across the nation and in Canada.

A buyback program that started in the Phoenix area in 1996 was one of the first and has been the most successful, according to its organizers at the Salt River Project, a power and water utility. The program has destroyed 15,504 gas-powered mowers.

In California, the Schwarzenegger administration is working with business groups, legislators and environmentalists to find financing for an existing state program that provides incentives for people to turn in older-model cars, trucks, buses and farm vehicles.