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Executive Summary

This year was the thirteenth year of the Lawn Care for Cleaner Air (LCCA) program and the fourth full year for the Grow More Mow Less (GMML) program. Both programs aim to reduce air pollution in Louisville by reducing lawn-related pollutant emissions. The LCCA program, which has both residential and professional levels, incentivizes cleaner lawn equipment use by Jefferson County residents through rebates and public awareness. Between the LCCA and Lawn Care for Cleaner Air Professional (Pro) programs, the Air Pollution Control District (APCD) issued a total of 453 rebates in 2016, worth $23,825.87. These numbers equate to a 34% increase from 2015’s totals in rebates (337) and a 38% increase in rebate dollars ($17,255.00). Among many other reasons that will be addressed later, the increase in rebates in 2016 can be, in part, attributed to the massive uptick in rebates in our Pro Program. We made significant changes to the program in 2016 that not only streamlined participation for consumers, but also boosted rebate dollar amounts to account for the higher costs associated with more powerful equipment. We issued 39 Pro rebates in 2016 and while that may not sound like a huge number, it marks a 550% increase over the number of Pro rebates in 2015 (6). GMML is a complementary program that encourages Louisvillians to replace high-maintenance turfgrass with “low mow” or “no mow” landscaping. The program’s popularity and visibility has continued to grow over the last few years, especially on Facebook, where the page’s “likes” have grown to over 1,900 and the page’s posts often reach over 1,000 people. In addition to our online presence, we still attend many public events throughout the year in order to reach as many people as possible. There will be more information regarding these efforts in the Public Outreach section below.

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I. Introduction There are over 71,000 mowable acres in Louisville. That’s a lot of grass. Perhaps it’s not completely surprising then that lawn maintenance-related air pollution (that is, pollution caused by lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and string trimmers) accounts for about 20.5 million pounds of air pollution in Louisville every year (7,100,000 pounds without CO2). This includes some 720,800 pounds of volatile organic compounds and 34,500 pounds of nitrous oxides, both of which are principal contributors to the formation of ground-level ozone. Worse yet, most of these emissions occur during the warm months of the year, when Louisville often struggles with elevated levels of ozone.

In order to reduce these lawn-related emissions, the Air Pollution Control District (APCD) created the Lawn Care for Cleaner Air program (LCCA) in 2003. LCCA gives rebates to Louisville residents on electric and reel lawn equipment and double rebates to those who recycle their old lawn equipment with Louisville Metro Solid Waste Management Division. After years of promoting the idea of air-friendly landscaping through the LCCA program, in 2012 APCD spun off a sister program called “Grow More Mow Less” (GMML).

GMML encourages people to replace their turfgrass with plants that don’t require mowing. To this end, GMML has been a regular presence at public events and on social media. The program has also engaged in demonstration and pilot projects, from a native plant garden, to low-mow turfgrass plots, to native grass test plots on roadsides, and vacant lots.

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II. Lawn Care for Cleaner Air (LCCA)

Electric lawn equipment can make a difference. Electric equipment emits less than 1/5 of the pollution of gas-powered equipment.1 Without electric lawn equipment, Louisville would have 2.6 million more pounds of air pollution every year, including 1 million pounds of carbon monoxide, nitrous oxides, and volatile organic compounds. Eliminating this pollution helps Louisville meet the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) and helps us all breathe a little easier. The LCCA program offers rebates for equipment for residential applications (equipment that is powered to handle 1/3 of an acre or less) and more powerful equipment for professional and larger property applications (equipment that is powered to handle 1/3 of an acre of more). The residential side of the program still remains the more popular option, but our Pro program saw major gains this year and we hope to see that trend continue in 2017.

1 These figures include carbon dioxide (CO2), a greenhouse gas of concern, though it is not a criteria pollutant

defined in the Clean Air Act. Those criteria pollutants, including oxides of nitrogen (NOx), carbon monoxide (CO), volatile organic compounds (VOC) – an ozone precursor, and particulate matter (PM) are produced in much smaller quantities relative to CO2. However, these pollutants can have health effects at much lower levels. The relative proportion by which air pollution is reduced with the switch from gas to electric equipment stays roughly the same with or without CO2 in the equation.

Includes CO, CO2, PM, NOx, SO2, and VOCs

Figure 1

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A. Status of LCCA in 2016

As stated in the Executive Summary, overall rebate totals for 2016 were up 34% over 2015’s totals, and consequently, rebate dollars were up by 38%. After very low numbers in 2015, we are essentially back to the number of rebates we issued in 2014.

When preparing the 2015 Annual Report this time last year, we asked ourselves a few questions about why our rebate totals had taken such a severe dive. Some of those questions were:

1. Is the market for electric equipment in Jefferson County becoming saturated, especially in the zip codes that we have historically targeted? If so, should we start targeting parts of Jefferson County that we have not in the past?

Answer: It appears that our market is not saturated as shown by our substantial increase in rebates in 2016. In fact, by targeting some of our advertising toward zip codes in the east end of the county we are now seeing the potential for growth there. In the five zip codes highlighted in Figure 4, you can see that we picked up a total of 46 rebates from 2015 to 2016. We also

Figure 2 Figure 3

Figure 4

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found that by increasing our overall advertising we were able to either maintain or recover some ground lost in 2015 in our traditionally highest performing zip codes (40205, 40204, 40206, 40207). There was an especially good recovery in 40205 where we saw a 50% increase in rebates over 2015.

2. Should we increase our advertising budget and/or diversify our advertising portfolio

instead of sticking to the outlets we normally use?

Answer: We increased our advertising spending in 2016 and added two new advertising partners (Louisville.com and the Voice Tribune). We believe this was a solid strategy that led to positive results. A much more detailed analysis can be found later in section II.C.

3. Would an increased presence of printed materials in stores show positive results?

Answer: While we can’t be absolutely sure what effect distributing more brochures and

posters around town had on our rebate increases this year, it seems only logical that more program exposure had some kind of positive impact. And not only did we distribute more promotional materials in 2016, but we also chose to display those materials in many more and varied locations than in the past. We targeted hardware stores, lawn and garden shops, coffee houses, restaurants, grocery stores, libraries, community centers, and more. By the end of the growing season we had distributed over 1,000 of our newly redesigned brochures seen below.

We redesigned the brochure in order to simplify our messaging, eliminate some redundancies, and add a new section that highlights our LCCA Pro program.

4. Is our current coordinator’s time adequate for maintaining the program? The coordinator is not solely

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devoted to the Lawn Care for Cleaner Air/Grow More Mow Less programs as previous coordinators have been. Answer: Bradley Coomes, LCCA and GMML coordinator, definitely spent more time working on these programs in 2016, but it seems that the effort was worth it, especially in regards to our ramped up grass roots efforts.

5. Is the trend in consumers processing their own rebates and foregoing our participating

retailers in favor of “big box stores” and online retailers such as Amazon.com hurting our rebate totals?

Answer: Since 2013 we have seen Dealer rebate numbers fall and Individual rebates climb. Since overall rebate totals fell during the same time period a case could have been made that there was a correlation between rebate type split and total number of rebates. It now appears that this assumption would be incorrect as this year we issued 328 Individual rebates opposed to only 125 Dealer rebates. This discrepancy did not lead to lower overall rebate totals. On the contrary, we saw huge gains in overall totals in 2016.

Our participants that decided to purchase their new equipment outside our network of dealers patronized several different retailers, but many of them chose Amazon.com, and local Home Depot and Lowe’s stores. Just the net increase in rebates from these three retailers (96) made up 21% of our total rebates in 2016.

Figure 5

Figure 6

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B. Professional Program During the 2012 lawn care season, LCCA Professional (then called “the Commercial program”) switched from giving rebates for trading in a 2-cycle gasoline string trimmer or leaf blower and buying a 4-cycle piece of equipment to giving rebates on higher powered electric equipment when trading in a gas-powered equivalent. We did this for two reasons: 1) new EPA regulations phased out the dirtier 2-cycle equipment, meaning we were already seeing the air pollution benefits of a 2-cycle-to-4-cycle transition without incentivizing the switch with rebates; and 2) more powerful electric equipment came on to the market. In the last year of the Commercial Program, we issued 94 rebates. In the first three years of the Pro program we issued 5, 3, and 6 rebates respectively. Something obviously wasn’t working with the program, so after considerable planning, we made the following changes:

1. We added a bonus rebate for trading in old, gas-powered equipment while also offering smaller, but still generous, rebates for equipment purchased without recycling vouchers. We made this change to mirror the process in the Residential program.

2. We added program flexibility by allowing program participants to process their own rebates without having to go through a participating retailer. Again, we removed this provision to better align the Pro program’s guidelines to those of the Residential program’s to streamline the process and avoid confusion.

3. We increased the rebate

amounts on Pro powered equipment. While more powerful lawn equipment has come down in price over the last few years, it is still generally more expensive than standard electric equipment.

Figure 7

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C. Advertising

We spent $20,850 in 2016 advertising with the Courier Journal (and courier-journal.com), the Louisville Eccentric Observer (Leo), Louisville Public Media, Louisville.com, and the Voice Tribune. The ad campaign ran early spring through summer with one late season ad in October focusing on leaf blowers. Our campaign included print, radio, targeted email, Facebook, and desktop/mobile display ads.

One might assume that our rebate totals were up in 2016 because we spent more on advertising this year. With help from the Louisville Metro Office of Performance Improvement & Innovation we discovered that there is a much stronger relationship between advertising spending and rebate totals the following year. That relationship can be seen in Figure 8 below. You can see that the increased advertising spending in 2015 led to a bump in rebates in 2016 and we are hopeful that this trend will continue in 2017.

Ad Spending and the Following Year’s Rebate Totals

2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017

$27,320 $24,661 $24,907 $14,461 $12,997 $17,651 $20,850

883 593 558 466 337 453 ???

Figure 9

Figure 8

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III. Grow More Mow Less

The Grow More Mow Less program (GMML) is based on this simple idea: reducing the amount of turf grass that needs to be maintained, either with traditional gas-powered equipment or with cleaner, electric-powered equipment yields a pollution savings of 100 percent. Accordingly, GMML seeks to reduce lawn-related air pollution in Louisville by encouraging landowners to switch to low-mow landscaping—trees, shrubs, groundcover, flowers ornamental grasses, edible plants, and low-mow turfgrass. These low-mow plants also have many co-benefits beyond their contributions to cleaner air, such as stormwater management, reduction of the urban heat island effect through shade and evapotranspiration, and increased habitat

for wildlife such as birds and beneficial insects. In 2016 the GMML program and APCD in general, worked hard to increase awareness of Louisville’s shrinking tree canopy and all the community efforts to rebuild that canopy. A healthy and robust tree canopy helps to reduce air pollution, mitigate the urban heat island effect, reduce stormwater runoff, and is just a great way to “grow more, mow less.” We will continue to support agencies such as the Louisville Metro Office of Community Forestry in 2017 to not only maintain the canopy we have, but help grow it for the future. One of our main goals is to partner with organizations in order to implement air-friendly principles on public and private lands in an attempt to reduce yard equipment related pollution.

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IV. Public Outreach A. Web/Social Media Presence

Our Lawn Care for Cleaner Air website provides all the information our participants need to take advantage of the program. It describes our rebate levels for the Residential and Pro programs, where to take old gas equipment to be recycled, and a list of our participating retailers. One can even print the rebate form needed to process an Individual rebate right from the sight. We made some noteworthy changes to the site in 2016 to let participants know about the many modifications made to the Pro program. The picture to the right demonstrates those changes, e.g., the increased rebate values and the new, streamlined rebate process.

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Our GMML Facebook page provides us a platform to not only let our “friends” know about our upcoming events, but to also share articles and posts related to air-friendly lawn care. To the right is one of our posts from August that shares some fall planting ideas. It’s a good representation of the kinds of posts we make on a daily/weekly basis. Thousands of people follow our page to learn about gardening best practices, share their experiences, and find out about all the “grow more” related events around town.

To the left is a picture of the Fiskar’s reel mower that we gave away at this year’s Louisville Sustainability Council Annual Summit.

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B. Public Events We attended several events in 2016 including Earth Day at the Louisville Zoo, the Center for Neighborhood’s Green Institute, a LCCA-sponsored WFPK Live

Lunch, and the Louisville Sustainability Council’s Annual Summit. These events provide us with a great opportunity to talk to people one on one, share ideas,

and distribute our program materials.

In addition to the great events listed above, we also had the chance this year to make two presentations, one via webinar and one in person, to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Region 4 Advance Program. The Advance Program is a collaborative effort by the EPA, states, tribes, and local governments to encourage emission reductions in attainment areas, to help them continue to meet the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for ozone and fine particulates. The webinar presentation solely dealt with the LCCA and GMML programs while the presentation made to the Advance Program at their Annual Workshop included information about our programs along with a broad overview of everything the Louisville Metro Air Pollution Control District does. The webinar presentation was made by Bradley Coomes, program coordinator, and Michelle King, Executive Administrator & Director of Program Planning. Michelle gave the presentation at the Annual Forum.

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IV. Looking Ahead

After such a great year for both programs we are expecting big things in 2017. After several years of declining rebate numbers, we saw a massive increase in 2016 due, at least in part, to the changes made to the LCCA Pro program. So much attention was paid to LCCA in 2016 that perhaps GMML did not expand like we hoped it would. We remain very open to partnering with other groups on projects related to air-friendly lawn care.

A. Lawn Care for Cleaner Air

1. Strategic Advertising

We have found that advertising dollars spent has a strong impact on rebates in the following year. In light of that discovery we believe that the increased spending in 2016 will mean higher rebate totals in 2017. Something else we discovered this year was that many of the zip codes we focused on this year with targeted advertising saw rebate increases. This will be something we explore in 2017 to see if we can replicate those results.

2. LCCA Professional

We completely revamped the Pro program in 2016 and that effort paid off. As stated earlier, Pro rebates were up 550% this year over 2015. We will continue to push the Pro program in 2017 and look for ways to tweak it to keep up with the growing market for more powerful equipment. We would like to find new ways to appeal to lawn care professionals in 2017 and help dispel the myth that electric equipment is inferior to gas-powered. B. Grow More Mow Less

1. Social Media

The GMML Facebook page remains extremely popular and provides a great platform for disseminating information to our “friends” regarding all things “grow more.” We will continue to look for and generate interesting posts that keep our followers engaged. There is also potential for advertising on our page that we have yet to explore. This may be something we look into in 2017.

2. Public Events We participated in many public events in 2016 and will look to do the same in 2017. Attending public events is key to our overall efforts because it gives us a chance to connect with people in person, hand out our program materials, and develop potential partnerships with like-minded organizations.

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V. Conclusion

The main takeaway from 2016 is that we must be willing to make changes to our programs if something isn’t working. LCCA Pro struggled to get off the ground for a few years before we were willing to revamp the program and now its future looks very bright. Also this year we reached out beyond our traditional target areas and saw increased rebate numbers in those parts of the county as a result. Finally, a ramped up grass roots effort in which we distributed our new brochures to scores of shops and centers on a near daily basis helped us reach brand new audiences. In conclusion, the changes we made and chances we took in 2016 have left our programs in great shape for 2017 and beyond.