Environmental Leadership Awards 1999: On the Treshold of a New Millennium

There are very few industries that put their member professionals into as much contact with the environment as the professional lawn and landscape industry does.

On a daily basis, more than 70,000 lawn and landscape companies and hundreds of thousands of employees set out to care for, nurture and develop the environment around them. These companies will provide a variety of services from the design of an office courtyard to the installation of a community park to the application of products to a homeowner’s front yard.

In fact, lawn and landscape professionals not only come into contact with the environment every day they go to work, but they are often the people most responsible for caring for the trees, shrubs and turf and keeping it healthy and alive for the rest of society to enjoy.

In recent years, however, environmentalists have repeatedly targeted the lawn and landscape industry and labeled it a source of environmental problems. Lawn care professionals have been told they are poisoning waterways and killing fish. Landscape contractors have been accused of driving harmful particulate matter into the air for people to inhale.

Unfortunately, regardless of the tremendous hours industry professionals spend training and certifying their employees and communicating the truth about lawn care products to their customers, some individuals will always accuse companies that apply pesticides of destroying the environment around us.

Oftentimes, these accusations and claims come from individuals or organizations that don’t understand or care to learn the truth about this industry’s commitment to be benefactors of the environment.

For example, how many industry critics realize that to bring just one new product to market a pesticide manufacturer will examine 15,000 to 40,000 potential new products each year at a cost of as much as $100 million dollars in annual research? And how many groups calling for the ban of pesticide products realize that the registration process each new pesticide must pass through can take as long as 10 years from start to finish before that product can be used?

Nonetheless, professional lawn and landscape contractors have made great strides in improving the reputation of the industry by professionalizing their business practices, educating their employees and constantly placing the environment at the forefront of their concerns.

Today’s contractors understand phrases such as Integrated Pest Management, targeted applications and pest monitoring, and the professional contractors in the market have made these phrases more than just words by integrating these concepts into their businesses.

The days of making excessive applications that load the soil with more product than is necessary are over, and each and every member of this industry must take it upon him or herself to spread this message to their community on a regular basis.

Lawn and landscape contractors are friends of the environment and deserved to be recognized as such.