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Huge fan of this. Gas-powered blowers are responsible for a disturbingly large portion of US air pollutants. Something like 10% of all CO, 5% of VOCs come from

• elevenoh 6y ago
  Could not agree more.
  • toomuchtodo 6y ago
    Please consider cribbing off of Oakland's ordinance and championing it where you live. The more locales where banned, the faster manufacturing of gas powered lawn implements dies off.
  • core-questions 6y ago
    Yes. I am a big fan of corded electric lawn gear. Maybe it doesn't work if you have to mow an acerage, but for a normal suburban environment corded blowers, trimmers, and mowers are all totally reasonable to use. No batteries to worry about, powerful enough, never have to fill up gas, often lighter than other options. There's still plenty of use cases for gas units but if we could get them banned from everywhere but rural areas it would be a good step in the right direction. Some folks go too far and say "nobody should have a lawn!!!" but they clearly don't understand the zenlike experience of avoiding one's family, drinking cheap lager, listening to a podcast, and working the lawn in the sunshine for a couple hours on a Saturday morning. Kept me sane last year more than anything else did.
    • throwaway0a5e 6y ago
      If you have a couple unobstructed squares to mow it's great. If you have stuff to go around the cord becomes more of a pain than the ICE equivalent.
    • nitrogen 6y ago
      There are high-performing battery electric mowers and trimmers now, that use the standard battery packs from power tool manufacturers, so they are really easy to find and easy to charge. No need to risk running over an extension cord.
    • sokoloff 6y ago
      Corded electrics are not powerful enough. A 15A, 120VAC circuit at 80% load can supply 1440 Watts of power or just under 2 HP, assuming all the power went to mechanical energy and none was lost to heat. Commercial leaf blowers are over 3 HP. 1-2 horsepower doesn't seem like a big difference, but it's literally 50-100% more power. My (small) push mower is 5.1 HP, over 250% of the max power I could get from a corded unit. It can still bog down in heavy, damp grass, especially while mulching. Take away 60% of its power and it's not going to get better. Battery trimmers are awesome; I'll give you that one.
      • folkrav 6y ago
        I don't know how much grass you have to deal with, but before renting, I had a small-to-medium sized lawn to mow, and I just didn't mow in heavy, damp grass. The electric I had supplied way more than enough power to mow everything I had to cover without a hitch. I can definitely see it becoming in issue on larger areas, with larger weeds or, in less dry weather, if you really _have_ to, like landscaper services, maybe. But for the average suburban lawn maintenance?
        • sokoloff 6y ago
          My lawn is on the small side (I can mow it all in 40 minutes, even if bagging). But it's a thick Kentucky Bluegrass and needs to be mowed 2-3x a week during the cool, wet spring and mid-fall. If we go away for a week-long vacation somewhere in the spring, that's a thick, high mess of grass that I need to mow when we get back.
          • folkrav 6y ago
            Ah, fast growing and thick, yeah. I had to mow every week and could push it to 2-3 in very dry weather.
      • core-questions 6y ago
        You're not wrong, but a mower can fit a 4-stroke engine; the law would make more sense to ban 2-strokes first. The real solution here is to mow more often, and on dryer days. Never had any issue with my corded units as long as I keep the lawn short. When it's long, you have to move in a few passes to get a nice cut without clogging things up. Mulching long grass is gross anyway, you'll get way too much grass detritus out of it; I know it's good for the lawn, but again, it makes more sense with a weekly mow and fairly short grass, rather than letting it grow into a field and mowing it once a month or something like that. You get out what you put in. Obviously that makes more sense for homeowners who do their own work as opposed to lawn companies; I'd be okay with exceptions for businesses, with 4-stroke only.
    • deleted 6y ago
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• anm89 6y ago
  Wow, those figures are mind blowing but honestly also don't even seem possible. 10% of all CO emmitted from what? Even 10% nationally? Including every semi truck, car and airplane? And then all of our national power generation system? It doesn't seem like blowers could be 10% of that no matter how you slice it.
  • CPLX 6y ago
    CO and CO2 are different things, it's worth noting.
  • spamizbad 6y ago
    Most gas-powered leaf blowers and trimmers have 2-cycle engines where you mix the oil and fuel together and pretty much directly exhaust the combustion. Can't be good to burn that stuff...
  • LeegleechN 6y ago
    The IC engines used for lawn tools have significant weight and cost constraints and less regulation compared to the IC engines used in transportation which makes them much more polluting. Similarly, motorcycle engines are more polluting than car engines by an order of magnitude.
    • mmckeen 6y ago
      Can you provide data on motorcycle engines? I do believe this to be true for 2-strokes and older motorcycles, but for modern Euro-4/5 regulated street motorcycles I very much doubt it.
      • bradlys 6y ago
        It's mostly for bikes before Euro4/5. Obviously, new bikes are one thing but most bikes in the USA are offenders of pollution. A statistic for CA was motorcycles make up 1% of my miles driven but 10% of smog pollutants.
        • 6y ago
• dheera 6y ago
  Not only that, but the dudes with gas leaf blowers outside my apartment seem to always make 3 or 4 passes by my apartment if I'm in the middle of a conference call. They seem to only make a single pass if I'm not having a call.
  • henearkr 6y ago
    The meeting is probably very interesting and they want to peek? :)
• ravenstine 6y ago
  As much as the environmental impact is significant, I'm mainly enthused because I really dislike the impact of the noise pollution. Having worked from home for a few years now, the worst part to me is the frequent landscaping noise throughout the day. Even if the gardeners all come by your block at the same day every week, they may show up to nearby blocks on other days of the week and create noise that's audible from far away. An hour of hearing overly loud landscaping equipment ruins my day, and I'm otherwise not a very neurotic person. I don't even get why gas powered lawn equipment has to be that loud; I attached a 2-stroke motor to a bike once with a cheap muffler and even that didn't sound as loud as most lawnmowers.
  • rootusrootus 6y ago
    > I attached a 2-stroke motor to a bike once with a cheap muffler and even that didn't sound as loud as most lawnmowers. I'd guess a combination of inexpensive underpowered engines and a spinning blade. I have an old mower with a big engine that doesn't really seem to work too hard, and it's only a little bit louder than my electric mower.
    • S_A_P 6y ago
      The worst offenders are 2 stroke engines which are smaller per hp than 4 strokes that would live on your lawn mower where size matters less. 2 stroke engines burn oil as a feature and are irritatingly loud. Ive a mix of battery/electric and gasoline lawn tools and a relatively large plot of land.(5ish acres) I cant use electric without a fleet of batteries charged and ready.
      • noahjk 6y ago
        I'm pretty protective of my batteries, but one time my wife accidentally ran one to empty and now it's a $120 paperweight. Battery prices are a big sticking point for me as my budget is just a little too small to be ok spending so much on one, and this incident made me reconsider staying electric in the future.
        • 6y ago
• tpmx 6y ago
  (Edited) I assume you mean: https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-09/documents/banks.pdf https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-09/documents... (2015) "All Nonroad sources account for approximately 242 million tons of pollutants each year, accounting for 17% of all VOC missions, 12% of NOx emissions, 29% of CO emissions, 4% of CO2 emissions, 2% of PM10 emissions, and 5% of PM2.5 emissions." What's "Nonroad" isn't clearly defined here, so I assume it's quite a lot more than "Gas-powered blowers".
  • porb121 6y ago
    page 7 and figure 2, "GLGE represented nearly 4% of All Emissions of VOCs and 12% of All Emissions of CO"
    • tpmx 6y ago
      Carbon Monoxide (CO) does not cause climate change. (https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2291/fourteen-years-of-carbon-monoxide-from-mopitt/ https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2291/fourteen-years-of-carbon-...) It's dangerous to humans in closed spaces, but that's not where leaf blowers are operated. (And yes, I also hate them, but that's not he point.)
      • porb121 6y ago
        i did not say anything about climate change
        • tpmx 6y ago
          So then I can only assume you included the carbon monoxide number because it was ... large?
          • porb121 6y ago
            it's a pollutant, and the primary pollutant of gas lawn equipment.
  • 6y ago
• vl 6y ago
  Great! Let’s hit the most protected group of all - small immigrant independent gardening contractors. They have piles of money lying around to buy new less effective equipment.
  • toiletfuneral 6y ago
    That's definitely a relevant point to this discussion for sure, but I guess as much as I hate technocratic solutions, I would still prefer some dumbass Neo-liberal subsidies ("cash for clunkers?") for upgrading than allowing continued use. You're especially right to be wary as these policies tend to ultimately penalize lower income workers, and I would prefer a larger discussion about solving housing access & other necessities that could make these structural changes way more equitable. This trap we're in is pretty depressing
  • pureliquidhw 6y ago
    If their customers can afford them now, they certainly can afford the $1/hr increase it would take to offset new equipment. This impacts home owners more. Also, just because it's inconvenient, doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
    • vl 6y ago
      Looks like you haven’t use either. Basically battery-powered gardening tools do not work out for contractors due to power, battery life and cost.
      • pureliquidhw 6y ago
        As a home owner I have. Corded blowers are fine. Battery trimmers are fine. There exists commercial grade electric stuff. Regulation costs money. Making a safer car was more expensive and it took tons of political legwork to legislate mandatory seatbelts/airbags/backup cameras. Doesn't mean it's not worthwhile.
• KorematsuFred 6y ago
  Just to put these claims in perspective using the paper you have quoted. > In 2011, approximately 26.7 million tons of pollutants were emitted by GLGE (VOC=461,800; CO=5,793,200; NOx=68,500, PM10=20,700; CO2=20,382,400) To quote other sources: CO emission in the United States in 2001 was 120.8 million short tons, of which 74.8 million came from on-road vehicles. Fair to say around 3% of total CO in USA today is being generated by GLGE (Gasoline powered lawn and garden equipment).
• SMAAART 6y ago
  Lawn maintenance is extremely expensive, and toxic, and polluting. Used to live in suburbia proper, and I used to have the worst lawn, my neighbors hated me, but I DGAF. There's nothing green about green lawns.
  • some-guy 6y ago
    When I rented a single family dwelling in the Central Valley in CA, I simply let the weeds / grass mixture take over while using a push-reel mower to keep it as a lawn, then let the lawn die during the summer and fall. Virtually no noise, no pollution, and even a brown lawn after being well kept didn't look terrible.
  • notacoward 6y ago
    The really crazy thing is that in many places you are required to maintain your lawn in something like the traditional manner. Not just in crazy Southern states, either. In my own town in Massachusetts, I remember a controversy about someone letting their lawn revert to a proper meadow, neighbors complaining that it harbored pests which destroyed their lawns, etc. It was crazy and hypocritical, but also exemplary of a common reality across the US.
  • asdff 6y ago
    Water use from watering your lawn is pretty insignificant when put up against other aspects of daily American life, or things like industry. I hate this sort of consumer side rhetoric for climate change. Change all the lawns in America to gravel you want, ban all the straws, none of that will make an impact when the biggest impact by a mile is from industry protected by a profitable regulatory environment their own lobbyists have designed. Better to go straight for the jugular when you need to kill Goliath than to try hitting him with a Nerf Dart.
• akeck 6y ago
  We still have a gas mower. Climate change has reduced our grass-cutting climate impact. In the past few years, our grass is dried out and almost dead by July. If we cut it after that, it becomes really dead. If we don't, it hibernates until the fall rains. So lately we don't cut our grass for two months out of the summer.
• roter 6y ago
  And particulate matter. The lawn maintenance workers come to neighbouring houses and just blow the stuff onto the street and towards the other houses. Then another crew comes in and blows it back. It eventually all ends up at my house. Clogging up my cpu fans...
  • toxik 6y ago
    Consider putting your computer indoors!
• xeromal 6y ago
  They're banned in LA but people still use them
  • asdff 6y ago
    I cannot believe they are actually banned, the leaf blower is like the state bird over here (maybe right after the ever present LAPD helicopter). Seems like a stupid easy ticket if the LAPD decided to spend the literal 10 minutes it takes to find one of these guys operating daily in absolutely every single neighborhood, but such is the nature of law enforcement in CA (Not to mention Chief Moore probably hires some guys with gas powered blowers for his place too).
• ericmcer 6y ago
  Having just moved to the suburbs during the pandemic I feel like I am taking crazy pills. So we all have lawns that we dump thousands of gallons of clean water on, then everyday from 9am-11am gardeners trucks pour into the suburban neighborhoods, make a huge racket mowing and blowing, and then an hour or two later they all flow back out. And the end result is all these neat squares of grass in front of everyones homes that serve no purpose. It is really baffling.
  • noahjk 6y ago
    Like a lot of things in life, it does serve a purpose, but only a social one (the social pressure of having a well manicured lawn), whether it's because of a HOA or a need to suck up to neighbors. Which makes it even more obnoxious than serving no purpose at all to me! Just another chore.
    • asdff 6y ago
      It does serve a purpose, though, it's parkland ultimately. People use their lawns to host events that might be larger than what their home could host, they are a safe area for children to play unsupervised, it's an area where you can produce food for yourself without having to spend earned income to feed yourself, livestock and pets can roam it, etc. Plus, many cities in the U.S. are park poor and the only greenspace really is what is available privately.
      • g8oz 6y ago
        Those points are mainly true of back yards, not really front yards though.
        • asdff 6y ago
          It depends on the local regulatory environment. You can do these things in your front yard where I live (based on what I've seen among my neighbors at least).
  • nineplay 6y ago
• mauvehaus 6y ago
  I hear you and agree with your intended outcome, but we should be legislating outcomes, not the path to reaching them. In this example, reasonable legislation would limit the noise and pollution from blowers, without specifically banning any particular technology. The US had sealed beam headlamps for years after better lighting technologies were invented because US law required them instead of mandating some technology-agnostic standard [0]. Or more recently, we've banned the use of phones while driving. I ask: is it legal to play harmonica while driving? If we agree that it shouldn't be, the law should be written to ban both using a phone or playing harmonica while driving without specifically mentioning either, except perhaps as examples. [0] https://www.carid.com/articles/brief-history-of-sealed-beam-headlights-in-us.html https://www.carid.com/articles/brief-history-of-sealed-beam-...
  • spollo 6y ago
    Unlike the sealed beam headlamps however, this law isn't requiring any particular technology. It's just outlawing a known harmful one. In some ways this is nicer because a company doesn't need to do specific emission and noise testing certifications to comply with a single municipalities regulations. So people in Oakland can have potentially more choices while achieving a reduction of combustion emissions.
    • rsj_hn 6y ago
      But it's still subject the same issues for the same reason. I can build a gas powered generator which feeds electricity to my electric blower and poof it's legal now. But in terms of noise/emissions/etc the problem is the same. So the lesson is that Government really shouldn't get in the game of trying to regulate specific technologies rather than whatever harmful side effects are created by the technology. Regulate noise and emissions, and let the engineers find the best ways of meeting those targets.
      • TheCoelacanth 6y ago
        No one's going to do that other than maybe an insane hobbyist. It would combine the worst aspects of gas and electric blowers. A law doesn't have to stop every possible bad outcome to be worth having.
• elindbe3 6y ago
  Not to mention they're just fucking annoying to listen to all day in the summer.
• souprock 6y ago
  New design: there is a piston engine, similar to the type that runs off of compressed air. It is powered by proprietary cartridges that contain compressed exhaust fumes. Cartridges are available in several different scents: 2-stroke, bunker fuel, trash-to-energy, coal, car fire, 100LL, tobacco, crematorium, etc. It meets the requirement.
• unpolloloco 6y ago
  You also have to legalize other options than having a well-manicured lawn. Often, you'll get fines or the city will just come in and do things for you (and charge you!) if your lawn grows above a certain point.