Spokane7
68°
March 25, 2011 in News
Phosophorus lawn fertilizer ban passes Senate
Bill heads back to the House with changes
OLYMPIA — The Senate approved a ban on phosphorus in lawn fertilizers, but with changes that will send the bill back to the House for another vote.
Among the changes: HB 1489 no longer exempts commercial organic fertilizers that contain phosphorus, and no longer has a broad statement about the problems the chemical can cause because of disputed research. It still allows phosphorus fertilizers to be used to get lawns started or to restore damaged lawns, and is aimed at discouraging residential users from putting the chemical on healthy lawns for fear that it will wash off with the rain or excessive watering, then flow into nearby lakes and streams.
It’s opposed by farm groups but supported by some cities, including the City of Spokane, as well as other entities that discharge into the Spokane River as a way to reduce the phosphorus levels in the river and Lake Spokane, where the chemical is thought to contribute to algae problems.
Among the companies backing the ban is the Inland Empire Paper Company, which has the same corporate parent as The Spokesman-Review.
The bill passed 32-16. Among Spokane-area senators, Mike Baumgartner, R, and Lisa Brown, D, voted yes; Jeff Baxter, Bob Morton and Mark Schoesler, all R, voted no.
Recent stories by Jim Camden
Recent stories in News
Gay marriage foes: referendum has enough signatures May 30, 2012 14- 1992 murder trial begins against sex offender May 30, 2012 1
- Supermajority for taxes unconstitutional, judge rules May 30, 2012 23
- Man dies following early Saturday car crash May 30, 2012 16
- Sex trafficking suspects released as probe continues May 29, 2012 7
masomenos on March 25 at 2:14 p.m.
Kudos, legislators! This one has been battled for 3 sessions. And don’t worry about the drive to Idaho…Scotts is now going P-free nationwide, so it won’t matter. Just like Cascade Dish Soap, which is now P-free in Idaho and the rest of the country…corporate big boys saw the way the wind was blowing and acted accordingly. Or maybe it’s because phosphorus prices are going through the roof due to a worldwide shortage??
Either way, an important step for Washington water quality…as long as the House can find a way to reconcile the new amendments from the SB.
DemoDriver on March 25 at 2:21 p.m.
Scotts isn’t the only brand going—and taxes are lower on a LOT of things in Idaho.
We’ll remember that, next trip east.
Lulubelle on March 25 at 2:43 p.m.
Demo….if ID is such a dandy-fine place…why don’t you live there? Oh that’s right….they get what they pay for…..its really the armpit of the Northwest.
valleyman on March 25 at 3:03 p.m.
How about you idiot legislators work on fixing the debt problems in this state and stay the hell out of my home, my dishwasher, and my lawn!
Darrenmolder on March 25 at 3:54 p.m.
Lowlowbelle, if Idaho is the armpit of the Northwest then why is it all you apple worms use it as your playground for your snowmachines, ATV’s, RV’s and boats. Then you take up all of our parking at our recreation areas and leave your trash on the ground for us to pick up after your sloppy selves. If I ever saw an armpit it is your ghetto ridden Spokangelas!
DemoDriver on March 25 at 4:00 p.m.
Lulubelle:
I’m all about consumer choice. I live here—no state income tax—but am not beyond driving a couple miles extra to the east to save on goods, or even to puchase goods that work.
Now, if only someone could market a toilet that actually works after a night of chili dogs… LOL
DemoDriver on March 25 at 4:03 p.m.
One more point Lulu—
When Buck Knives escaped California, why didn’t they come here, to WA, instead of relocating to idaho?
Could it be that Olympia’s policies reminded them uncomfortably of what they were getting from Sacramento?
dukkandpooh on March 25 at 4:38 p.m.
You can actually buy Cascade with phosphates in its powdered form at the little state line handy mart. It’s 11 bucks a box, but it lasts several months and gets your dishes very clean.
And PFC is just up the road…you can still get your phosphate containing fertilizer there.
Just make sure you have some shades and a ballcap when you make the trip over…LOL
RedCedar on March 25 at 6:07 p.m.
Good. I’m not big on more government regulations, but lawns are probably the biggest unnecessary cause of water pollution left in this country. I hope the law applies to golf course and commercial lawns too. Obviously phosphorus is a necessary plant nutrient and it would be hard to do modern farming without it, but we don’t need it dumped all over suburbia where most of it runs off due to the one of the other environmental problems with lawns: over-watering. The trouble is that phosphorus is only one part of the lawn problem. The others are ridiculous amounts of nitrogen (like feeding your kids pure sugar), and the fact that practically everyone uses weed killer fertilizer whether they actually have weeds or not. All that poison has to go somewhere, and that’s into the same water that the phosphorus gets into.
Honestly, now that pollution from heavy industry and motor vehicles has largely been cleaned up in this country, the next thing to go after should be lawns. Everything about them is bad for the environment, and unlike other sources of pollution there is no offsetting benefit at all, other than the fact that a lot of people like to have short green grass around their houses. Even high-phosphate detergent at least does a good job of cleaning things, which is a useful function. Lawns require lawn mowers, weed-whackers, and leaf blowers, all of which are noisy and contribute to air pollution. They provide habitat for absolutely no wild animals, especially when dosed with sundry poisons. All the fertilizer, week killer, and bug killer ends up in the ground water or storm water runoff.
To top it all off, there is actually quite a global shortage of phosphorus. Phosphate rock is in short supply, and new deposits aren’t being discovered. One of the few places there’s a lot of it is in South Idaho (Ft. Hall), but environmentalists have blocked expansion of the mines. Let’s save what we have left for something useful, like growing potatoes and making roundup rather than wasting it on lawns.
Spokane_Citizen on March 25 at 6:25 p.m.
Buck Knives went to Idaho because they don’t have to contend with such nonsense as ‘workers’ rights’…they’ve got a captive workforce of desperate slaves….almost as pliable as the ones they employ overseas through foreign surrogates.
DHF on March 25 at 7:19 p.m.
The Inland Empire Paper Co. was not allways your non polluting neighbor as I can remember back in the 50s when they discharged ,I was told Sulfide and god only knows what else into the Spokane River as we used to swim under the Millwood Bridge. It would leave a green slime and foam that smelled like rotten eggs. Of course they were not the only one’s. Kaiser and the Spokane Portland Cement did there share. A little ancedote of history. I am for a green lawn and clean water as I live on a river.
misjustice on March 25 at 7:23 p.m.
Yep, Spokane Citizen; you beat me to it. Ideeho is a “right to work” state; translation = work the regular Joes and Janes like dogs for low, low, low wages. Sad, but true.
Excellent points, RedCedar; lawns are a waste of natural resources, water mainly…
Spokane_Citizen on March 25 at 7:40 p.m.
None of the Spokane River’s neighbors used it as anything more than a convenient means of disposing of every kind of industrial and community waste until government regulation (driven by citizens who were tired of such abuse) intervened. Make no mistake about it, without such regulations, the adjacent communities would again relegate the Spokane River to no more than a flowing cesspool.
As you allude, the fertilizer phosphorus ban is a win-win solution. It helps keep a eutrophying chemical out of Lake Spokane, and it conserves a rapidly diminishing critical resource (one that hasn’t attracted the kind of news coverage it deserves).
Of course,the doofuses (doofii?) in Spokane, and Idaho, won’t understand a bit of this stuff…..until the situation once again turns menacing, at which time they’ll accuse government of not protecting their interests.
Spokane_Citizen on March 25 at 7:53 p.m.
Misjustice…one can only assume that many Idahoans are happy in their ignorance and poverty….just as there were slaves that fought for the confederacy. There are always those whose highest desire is seeking their master’s approval.
greenlibertarian on March 25 at 8:52 p.m.
When I bought a brand new house up in Mead about 15 years ago, I noticed that most of neighbors just hydroseeded on top of that Mead Sand, put in a overspraying sprinkler system, and to fertilize 3-5 times a season to keep their perfect lawns green.
Having been a small farmer and helped put lawns in before, I couldn’t believe this!
I had 20 yards of super-premium top soil brought in, then had a guy till that in to the existing sand to a depth of 9-12 inches, creating a rich loamy soil for the grass to grow. (Used the Northwest Seed and Pet grass seeding system.)
I precisely designed a sprinkler system, including a separate line around the perimeter of the house for drip irrigation for shrubbery, same for around the perimeter of the property.
I kept the grass mowed tall, left the clippings, and I only fertilized once per year. Even on the hottest days of the summer, I could water only every other day or every third day, and lawn remained green, while my neighbors who planted on sand often were watering TWICE A DAY on the hottest days. Ridiculous.
I used drip irrigation on the boxwood hedge and all the other shrubbery, got most of the shrubs as bareroot from the Lawyer Nursery outfit for about 1/5 the cost of more established shrubs. The grew like weeds! For the shrub beds, I went down about 2 feet, mixing in top soil and peat moss into the sand.
Common sense! (Or so I thought.) And it wasn’t about being “green”, it was about caring for the environment my family was living in!
RedCedar on March 25 at 11:17 p.m.
Greenlibertarian, you are spot on about good soil and leaving the clippings on. With most of the tract houses, and the EPA “remediation” up here in the Valley, all they do is put down a layer of “topsoil” that is just sand, gravel, log yard dregs, and maybe some manure, and then unroll sod on top of it. With enough water, it lasts for a while. I have never fertilized a lawn anywhere, I’ve never removed the clippings from it, and it always looks just fine, at least to me. I water the shrubs and herbs, but if it’s a dry summer and the grass dries up, it come right back when it rains in the fall.
As with farming, the key is healthy microbes and arthropods (bugs and worms) in the soil. That’s what turns grass clippings back into nutrients, gives the soil tilth so it will hold water and allow air in, and generally keeps a lawn, unnatural as it is, relatively healthy with no added chemicals. The bug killers and week killers destroy all of that, so all you have is a sterile culture medium.
Pretty soon Home Depot, Lowes, and Wal*Mart will have their big piles of spring yard care stuff out for sale. Take a look at see if you can even find a sack of plain lawn fertilizer, phosphorus-free or not. If they have one kind of plain fertilizer, they’ll have at least a dozen kinds of weed-and-feed, weed-and-feed plus insecticide, bayer advantage (insecticide), turf builder plus, turf builder halt, etc, etc.You’re a hard-pressed to even find sack of fertilizer these days that doesn’t have some poison added to it. Time was when, if you really wanted to give your lawn the chemical kick, you could go to the feed store and buy some ammonium nitrate and potassium nitrate, but they’re all gone. If you want cheap nitrogen you can still get a sack of urea, which stinks but all the farmers use it and it works fine.
As for phosphorus, I believe they’re still going to allow rock phosphate (straight out of the ground) and super phosphate (rock phosphate treated with acid to make it more soluble), and there’s always the old standby, bone meal, which might be the best of all because it’s slow release and 100% organic. It’s hard to believe but 100 years ago, when New Jersey was the “Garden State” to New York city, all they had for fertilizer was organic stuff like manure, fish waste, and slaughterhouse waste, and they grew vegetables just fine. In those days, lawn fertilizer, if there was any, consisted of top-dressing the lawn with composted manure every spring. Somebody ought to try that again to demonstrate that you don’t need to spread a sack of yard poison all over your lawn every two weeks and then keep it drenched with water.