Home & Garden Mower exchanges: Don’t trade one problem for another Apr 1, 2011 5:17 PM

Mowing your lawn for an hour can be as polluting as a long car ride if you’re still pushing a gas-powered mower made before 1997. Mower exchange programs can slice up to $250 off the cost of a greener cordless electric model. But based on Consumer Reports latest mower tests, not all cordless mowers cut it so you might end up trading your old clunker for a new one.

Run by state and local clean air agencies, mower exchanges work like this: The sponsoring agency is given a few thousand discounted mowers by manufacturers for each event. Programs generally start in April and run through the early mowing season. This month there will be exchanges in several South Carolina counties as well as in two counties in California’s Napa Valley in the north and in Orange, Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties in the south. In May, a seven-county area around Denver will hold an exchange.

Reservations can be made on a first-come, first-serve basis, and mower quantities are limited. Some programs let you drop off your old mower and pick up a new one at a specific site, while others send you and your old mower to an approved recycling center to get a voucher to order a new mower online. To find an exchange near you, check the National Association of Clean Air Agencies website.

Cordless electric mowers, while less polluting, have their limitations. For example, you typically get 30-45 minutes of mowing time between battery recharges, which makes them better suited for lawns smaller than one-third of an acre. And in our new tests, we found only two cordless electric models worth recommending and both were from Black & Decker. Electric mowers aren’t the only way to cut emissions. New gas-powered mowers in California already comply with tougher federal regulations on exhaust and evaporative emissions, which go into effect nationwide next year.

So what happens to your trusty old mower? A spokesman for Stanley Black & Decker, which provides some of the new mowers, said that his company monitors local recyclers who dispose of the discarded mowers to make sure they comply with EPA regulations on gasoline disposal. Some parts of the reclaimed mowers are used locally, but a number of recyclers ship the old mower parts to China. Even if they’re put on a slow boat, that journey adds to the mowers’ carbon footprint.

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