What is your yard really doing for the air? Project EverGreen’s Clean Air Calculator helps answer that question by showing how your lawn, trees, and landscape contribute to cleaner air. Once you’ve entered your yard’s details and received the results, the next step is understanding what those numbers mean for your family, neighborhood, and community.

The Clean Air Calculator was designed to translate the environmental benefits of healthy lawns, trees, and landscapes into something homeowners can understand and act on. It measures how your yard contributes to yard air quality, carbon sequestration in lawns, and cleaner, healthier air for people in your community.

This guide walks you through how to read your score, what each metric represents, and how small changes to your yard can make a measurable difference.

Why Your Yard Matters More Than You Think

Healthy green spaces don’t just look good. They work hard behind the scenes. Lawns, trees, and shrubs act as natural air filters, capturing carbon dioxide, producing oxygen, cooling neighborhoods, and reducing airborne pollutants.

The Clean Air Calculator helps put real numbers behind the environmental benefits of healthy yards, showing how everyday residential landscapes contribute to cleaner air at a local level.

Decoding the Key Results

Carbon Sequestered: What Your Yard Stores

What it means: Carbon sequestration refers to how much carbon dioxide your lawn and landscape plants pull from the air and store in soil and plant material.

How to think about it: Your calculator result may be compared to:

Miles driven in a car
Gallons of gasoline burned
Hours of home energy use

For example, if your yard sequesters the equivalent of hundreds of miles of driving, it means your landscape is actively offsetting emissions created by everyday activities.

Why it matters: Even modest-sized lawns and landscapes play a role in reducing atmospheric carbon, especially when multiplied across entire neighborhoods.

Clean Air Produced: Oxygen and Pollutant Reduction

What it means: Plants naturally produce oxygen while also capturing pollutants such as particulate matter and ozone.

How to think about it: The calculator often expresses this in relatable terms, such as hours of air conditioning offset and equivalent clean air for a certain number of people.

This helps connect abstract measurements to real-world comfort and health.

Why it matters: Cleaner air contributes to healthier lungs, improved outdoor comfort, and reduced heat stress, especially in urban and suburban communities.

People Benefitted: Your Yard’s Ripple Effect

What it means: This estimate shows how many people could benefit from the clean air your yard helps produce over time.

How to think about it: It’s not just about your household. Air moves, circulates, and benefits neighbors, passersby, and your broader community.

Why it matters: Collectively, residential landscapes create a meaningful environmental impact when millions of homeowners maintain healthy yards.

How Different Yards Score: Three Sample Profiles

A Typical Suburban Lot

Moderate turf coverage
A few mature trees
Some foundation plantings

What the score shows: Balanced benefits across carbon storage and air quality, with solid performance and room for improvement through added trees or healthier turf.

A Heavily Treed Yard

Large canopy trees
Layered shrubs and groundcover
Healthy soil

What the score shows: Higher carbon sequestration and stronger air-cleaning benefits, highlighting the significant role trees play in improving yard air quality.

A Minimally Landscaped Yard

Limited turf
Few or no trees
Sparse plantings

What the score shows – Lower overall impact, but also the greatest opportunity. Adding even one tree or expanding turf can significantly improve results.

Where Your Yard Is Doing Well and Where It Can Do More

Your Clean Air Calculator score isn’t a grade. It’s a snapshot.

It helps identify strengths you’re already building on and small, achievable changes that can deliver big gains. Simple improvements can include:

Planting an additional tree
Expanding turf in underutilized areas
Improving lawn health through proper mowing, watering, and soil care
Adding shrubs or native plants that support long-term growth

Each change compounds over time, improving both carbon sequestration in lawns and overall air quality benefits.

The Bigger Picture: Why This Tool Exists

The Clean Air Calculator reinforces a simple truth: yards matter.

When homeowners understand the environmental value of their landscapes, they’re more likely to protect and improve them, benefiting communities, neighborhoods, and future generations.

Your yard is already doing important work for the air. The calculator helps you see it, understand it, and make it even better.

Try the Clean Air Calculator and explore how your yard contributes to cleaner, healthier air and what it could do next.