By Rye Garden Club Conservation Committee
With spring on the horizon, now is the time of year when we’re renewing residential lawn mowing contracts and making decisions for the care of our yards with the help of professional lawn care services and landscapers like those at https://www.bltlandscapes.com. People can look into high quality landscaping company rochester mn if they need the best landscaping services.
Here are a few important reasons you should go organic.
Human Health, Especially Children’s
There is a reason that lawn and tree care companies such as Proscapes And Tree are required to place the yellow sign pictured here on lawns they have treated. Chemical pesticides and fertilizers are a serious threat to human health, particularly children’s health, and our community should be avoiding them at all costs.
The experts from Treemover Environmental Design states that children are especially sensitive to health risks posed by pesticides and chemical lawn products because their internal organs are still developing and are less able to excrete toxins. At the same level of exposure, children will absorb more chemicals because they take in more breaths per minute. Typical children’s behaviors, such as playing on lawns and floors or putting objects in mouths, increase a child’s exposure to chemical pesticides and fertilizers. Also, there are “critical periods” in human development when exposure to a toxin can permanently alter the way an individual’s biological system functions.
Poisons in Your Home
Chemical fertilizers and pesticides enter your home when they become airborne and when they are tracked into the home by pets and people’s shoes. These chemicals, intended for outdoor use, will persist for years indoors in the air, and on carpets, floors, and household items because they are sheltered from the outdoor conditions such as rain and sun that normally break them down. A 2003 study by the Silent Spring Institute showed residents are still exposed to dangerous levels of pesticides in their home decades after application.
Medical Proof of Harm
Numerous respected medical sources link lawn care chemicals to long-term health problems in children, including leukemia, brain cancer, non-Hodgkins lymphoma, soft tissue sarcoma, asthma, and decreased cognitive functioning.
A University of Southern California study showed that children whose parents used home and garden pesticides were 6.5 times more likely to develop leukemia.
A 1990 study by the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment concluded that “pesticide poisoning can lead to poor performance on tests including intellectual functioning, academic skills, abstraction, flexibility of thought, and motor skills; memory disturbances and inability to focus attention; deficits in intelligence, reaction time, and manual dexterity; and reduced perceptual speed. Increased anxiety and emotional problems have also been reported.”
A study published in Pediatrics (May 2010) supported the above when they found a strong link between exposure to lawn chemicals and ADHD.
The American Journal of Epidemiology warns that exposure of parents (including fathers) to pesticides is associated with birth defects and infertility in the next generation.
It has long been known that airborne chemicals trigger asthma. Although no single study can conclusively prove that a certain pesticide causes asthma, studies have found evidence that exposure to lawn maintenance chemicals is correlated with higher rates of asthma in children and adults.
If you employ landscape design and lawn services to help you build and maintain your yard, insist upon organic methods and products. If your long-term team balks at this, it is time to find a new service. There are more lawn care professionals today that are educated in natural, healthier gardening than there have been for a long time. If you maintain your own yard, many excellent safe and natural fertilizers and chemicals can be found at arbico-organics.com.
