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Homeowners looking to go green may want to look into a grass driveway |
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Written by Michael Oliveira, THE CANADIAN PRESS
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Saturday, 02 August 2008 |
A Marshall homes model home features a grass driveway at a new home devopment in Oshawa, a Toronto suburb, Tuesday, July 29, 2008. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Michael Oliveira
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OSHAWA, Ont. - It's the latest thing in high-tech driveways, replacing that ugly black asphalt with an environmentally-friendly substitute that filters out impurities and keeps salt, sealants and other noxious chemicals out of municipal sewer systems.
Just be sure to keep it watered, weeded and mowed.
That's right, the solution to paved driveways - which serve to funnel all manner of toxins directly into the environment - just might be the grass right next to it.
Passersby on Copperfield Road in Oshawa, Ont., have been doing double-takes since Marshall Homes recently installed a grass driveway for a model home that's decked out with a number of environmentally-friendly features.
"People were standing there thinking we were nuts when we first came here," said company president Craig Marshall.
"But then they see it looks really nice; it softens the look of the house, taking away the black driveway."
Not even heavy trucks and SUVs - environmentally friendly hybrids only, please - will rip up or flatten the grass, thanks to a plastic support grid that sits just below the surface and absorbs the pressure of vehicles.
It's a technology that's been around for several years, but most installations in Canada have been in business settings and very few homeowners even realize it's an option. Now, with Canadians more concerned than ever about the environment, Marshall figures its time has come.
Grass driveways help to protect the environment by absorbing and reducing runoff going into the sewers, Marshall said, preventing things like driveway sealants, oil, salt, and car care products from going down the drain.
"It's all about water infiltration into the ground instead of running out onto the street and down into our sewers and into our lakes and rivers," he said.
"The more groundwater you can keep on the site, the less damage it's going to do to the environment and the habitats of fish and things in the rivers and lakes."
Marshall said the only major unknown about the grass driveway is how it will survive a cold, snowy winter, so he's not yet making it an option in his new homes until it can be fully tested.
"What we're planning to do is keep (the grass) low and use a snowblower on it and see how that works out and at the end of the winter we'll reassess," he said.
"We want to know how much maintenance it's going to take over the longer term versus an asphalt driveway, but one thing we do know is you won't have to spray it with tar every year, so that's one benefit."
Rick Cavallero of Invisible Surfaces, a company based out of Colorado that sells similar grass driveway technology, said snow isn't a problem for the surface, although constant traffic is.
He recommends that customers not go in and out of the same spot more than four or five times a day if they want their grass to last.
"It's not for every day, in and out constantly, because you're going to wear out the turf," Cavallero said.
But you shouldn't leave a vehicle parked on the grass for days on end either, he added.
"If you leave a car parked on it and it can't get sun for days at a time the grass will yellow out," he said. "It is turf, after all."
The cost of a grass driveway is estimated to be about $10 a square foot, which is a little less than an interlock driveway but about five times the cost of a standard driveway, Marshall said.
One environmentally-unfriendly element of the grass driveway is the extra water usage needed to keep it healthy, but Marshall said other water-saving upgrades in the company's model home more than compensate.
In addition to low-flow toilets, shower heads and faucets installed throughout the house, a special tank housed in the basement takes the water used during showers and baths and reroutes it to be used in the toilets.
"If this water wasn't coming from (showers and baths) it'd be coming from Lake Ontario, going through a treatment plant and then pumped all the way up to north Oshawa, consuming a lot of electricity along the way," he said.
The only drawback is the toilet water can end up being a little soapy, he said, but it's otherwise a "brain-dead simple way to save 30 per cent of your water usage and sewage usage."
There are also energy-saving compact fluorescent bulbs in sockets throughout the home and all the paint is recycled with low levels of volatile organic compounds.
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