New Jersey County Finds Model in Fertilizer Restriction Campaign

As they move closer to enacting restrictions on lawn fertilizer use, Ocean County officials have another question to consider: How do they get homeowners to make a connection between their green lawns and a discolored, jellyfish-infested Barnegat Bay?

They might take some cues from Chesapeake Bay, where federal and state agencies hired a smart and sassy social marketing group to craft an advertising campaign. Since it started in the Washington area in 2005, the "Chesapeake Club" outreach program has been advocating reduced fertilizer use as part of a lifestyle for people who live around the bay.

"The message becomes, "If you're out there fertilizing in the spring, you don't know about the area,' " said Peter Mitchell, chairman and chief creative officer at Salter-Mitchell/Marketing for Change, the agency that designed the Chesapeake Club effort. "It's very much about fitting into the neighborhood."

The Ocean County Health Department is planning to draft a sanitation ordinance to regulate use of lawn fertilizer, which researchers say is a major source of excess nutrients that flow into Barnegat Bay tributaries like the Toms and Metedeconk rivers. In the bay, nitrogen nutrients do the same thing they do on lawns — feed plant growth.

But in the bay, that growth comes in explosive blooms of microscopic plants called phytoplankton, and drifting masses of macroalgae such as sea lettuce, scientists say. The cycle is driving eutrophication, a process that's changing the bay's basic ecology, even making it more hospitable for invasive species like stinging sea nettle jellyfish.

Mitchell was instrumental in the famed anti-smoking campaign called "The Truth," which threw away the customary, earnest warnings of health dangers.

"Teenagers don't worry about their health. They're not smoking to get healthy; they're smoking to be cool, to get dates. They're smoking to rebel," Mitchell said. His campaign turned the theme of rebellion against corporate tobacco, with the message that young smokers are fooled by cigarette marketing.

Any approach begins with finding what really motivates the target audience, said Mitchell, a former reporter for the old Elizabeth Daily Journal and the Wall Street Journal who now designs "behavior changing campaigns." In his research among Chesapeake Bay residents, Mitchell says he found "no statistical correlation at all" between their lawn care practices and attitude toward the environment.

"What's in your mind's eye is the lawn. People look at that green grass, and they're not thinking about nutrients downstream," he said. Lawns are very important "to people who entertain more, people who are concerned about how their home fits into the neighborhood. . . . You have to look at what is the relationship."

Mitchell says a public outreach plan for the Barnegat Bay watershed might play on relating low fertilizer use to regional pride of place and lifestyle, as the Chesapeake Club does. "That's much more powerful than just saying "use less fertilizer' or "follow the instructions on the bag,' " he said.

Mitchell's clients at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Maryland and Virginia state agencies wanted to encourage people to limit fertilizer use to the fall, and follow-up surveys showed the campaign had some success, he said: "A lot of people just stopped using fertilizer."

Ocean County health officials are sounding out other agencies and groups on several issues, including how a fertilizer ordinance would be enforced and what kind of public support it would have, said Health Department spokesman Edward Rumen. The department is also researching legal issues examining a model ordinance the DEP has drawn up, as part of a similar regional effort to reduce phosphorus-based nutrients in northern New Jersey's Passaic River watershed.

A couple of approaches are possible. Environmental activists, headed by Save Barnegat Bay and the Ocean County Sierra Club, have drawn up a model ordinance that would allow sale of only slow-release fertilizers. Another possibility is a seasonal limit, like the prohibition on late fall and winter fertilizing in Suffolk County on Long Island.

"We are very certain our ordinance would be the best in the country," said Willie deCamp of Save Barnegat Bay. "There are ordinances in Florida that are not as strong as ours. . . . What we really need now are expressions of support from the public to the (county) Board of Freeholders."

DeCamp said his group pressed the science and technical committee of the Barnegat Bay National Estuary Program to evaluate the slow-release ordinance, and the advisers may meet this winter to compare the ordinance options. Meanwhile, Save Barnegat Bay is proceeding with its own publicity effort before the spring yard-work season arrives.

"Public education has to go forward," deCamp said. "But (an ordinance) would get a tremendous amount of nitrogen out of the the bay. But we need the county to get it right."

ON THE WEB: Visit www.chesapeakeclub.org for more about the Chesapeake Club, and www.nitrogenfree.com for more about Save Barnegat Bay's Nitrogen Pollution Action Project.