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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 tru

by 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.
    - kube-system 6y ago
      Bikes didn't require catalysts for a long time. And they often used less-precise fueling systems, like carburetors. But that has changed or is changing in a lot of places more recently.
  - jascii 6y ago
    Carbon emission has an almost direct relationship to the amount of fuel burned, so assuming single occupancy, even older motorcycles do fair better than most cars in that respect. Particulate and NOX emission, not so much.
- sdljfjafsd 6y ago
  Practically this incorrect. When a car is in single or double occupancy (which is majority of cases) it will pollute more than a motorcycle one. Yes, a filled bus or car might be more efficient, but the average utilization on an auto is very low since most people drive them alone.
  - MagnumOpus 6y ago
    You might be talking CO2 emissions where a car emits more than a bike. Pollution is a different matter though. Even the big 4-stroke tourers have worse emission control than cars; the 2-stroke motorbikes are exponentially worse in SOx/NOx/CO/particulate emissions (which hurt your lungs rather than the climate).
clusterfish 6y ago
The two stroke engines they use are terrible. I mean you mix oil into the fuel so it just burns off. No surprise that it's polluting disproportionately.
mumblemumble 6y ago
I don't know about the 10% figure, but regardless of whether you pick numbers from the high or low end of the range of estimates, the impact of lawn equipment is still staggering. 4 cycle engines make a huge difference, as do things like catalytic converters and scrubbers. 2-stroke engines, on the other hand, are both a horribly inefficient design to begin with, and also typically come fitted with absolutely no pollution controls. Also, it's not just leaf blowers. It's also lawn mowers and other gas powered lawn equipment.
jandrese 6y ago
Cars and Trucks have catalytic converters for a reason. If we were serious about this we would have mandated the same for lawn equipment (at serious expense mind you). Now I think everybody is quietly waiting for the revolution of battery powered lawn equipment to make this moot.
- zdragnar 6y ago
  I have a battery powered leaf blower that I wouldn't dare give up for a gas one. The ease of use and volume difference is amazing. It wouldn't be great for large commercial estates, but the runtime is more than enough for most homeowners. I have a second battery to swap and fast charge, but I also have an abnormal number of messy trees on 5 acres.
- bluGill 6y ago
  The revolution is obviously coming. The big manufactures probably support this as it will force their customers to replace working equipment with their new battery lines.
  - Blackthorn 6y ago
    It's already here. Try the battery powered options from the usual brands (I prefer Makita), they are fantastic.
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    They are already selling full product lines. For example: https://www.husqvarna.com/us/products/battery/ https://www.husqvarna.com/us/products/battery/ (I don't remember how I ended up there but I was looking at their battery products a few months ago)
  - rootusrootus 6y ago
    Oh yeah, it's already here. The money to be made is huge. Used to be you'd go buy a Honda mower and it would run with practically zero maintenance for 20 years or more. Now you go get a cordless mower and replace batteries every two or three years, and the whole thing becomes obsolete pretty quickly. It's a lucrative market.
bluGill 6y ago
Emissions controls for cars, and semi-trucks started becoming a thing in the mid 1970s, and standards have got stronger over the years. There are a few collector cars around, but for the most part anything in actually use is pretty clean, emitting CO2 and H2O. (Of course CO2 has issues, but short term nothing nearly as harmful as what small engines produce) Small airplanes have not kept up (they still use lead fuel!), and so are overall worse than lawn equipment. However there is a lot more lawn equipment. (I don't know anything about modern jet engine emissions)
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
  You weren't lying. 230k planes worldwide take leaded fuel. More than half in the USA. https://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsId=14754 https://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsId=1...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
e2e8 6y ago
From the above cited paper: 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), accounting for 24%−45% of all nonroad gasoline emissions. Gasoline-powered landscape maintenance equipment (GLME; leaf blowers/vacuums, and trimmers, edgers, brush cutters) accounted for 43% of VOCs and around 50% of fine PM. Two-stroke engines were responsible for the vast majority of fine PM from GLME.
kube-system 6y ago
Note that the above is not talking about CO2. Pollutants other than CO2 are typically heavily regulated for on-road vehicles and power generation, and they have expensive systems that prevent a very significant amount of those pollutants from being emitted. For example, your cars catalyst prevents a lot of pollutants from being emitted -- but your lawnmower doesn't have this device at all. CO2 is a different story all together -- because it's the primary byproduct.
sdljfjafsd 6y ago
They are extremely wasteful. Auto manufacturers are always improving emissions on their engines but thats not the case in lawn equipment. Passenger flights and leaf blowers are two largely western luxuries that are absolutely horrible for our environment.
snarfy 6y ago
I recall reading somewhere a gas powered leaf blower emits as much CO pollution in 15 minutes as a full sized SUV does over a 1000 mile cross country trip. They are insanely dirty in comparison.
throwawayboise 6y ago
Yeah it seems nonsensical. My 2-stroke lawnmower burns maybe a pint of fuel three or four times a month or so. My car burns gallons a day. Granted the car exhaust is cleaner, but it's so much more total hydrocarbon burned.
cwkoss 6y ago
Lawn equipment tends to have proportionally huge non-CO2 pollutant emissions because they are meant to be portable and thus have been exempted from emission standards. From what I've read, it seems like lawn equipment manufacturers do not consider pollution as a parameter when designing their equipment. Electric lawn equipment has only become viable in the market in the past decade or so due to improved batteries. Now that electrification is feasible (and often nicer to use than gas-powered), seems great to ban or at least disincentivize combustion engine equipment.
cmrdporcupine 6y ago
As others have pointed out, not CO2 but other pollutants, mainly. Because of 2 stroke engines. They literally throw oil particles into the air, and burn oil mixed in with the gas. Lightweight, mechanically simple, and variable torque, but absolutely environmentally awful. And noisy.
Twirrim 6y ago
> It doesn't seem like blowers could be 10% of that no matter how you slice it. A couple of quotes from, comparing a two stroke leaf blower to a 2011 F-150 SVT Raptor: https://www.edmunds.com/about/press/leaf-blowers-emissions-dirtier-than-high-performance-pick-up-trucks-says-edmunds-insidelinecom.html https://www.edmunds.com/about/press/leaf-blowers-emissions-d... "The hydrocarbon emissions from a half-hour of yard work with the two-stroke leaf blower are about the same as a 3,900-mile drive from Texas to Alaska in a Raptor," said Jason Kavanagh, Engineering Editor at Edmunds.com. "As ridiculous as it may sound, it is more 'green' to ditch your yard equipment and find a way to blow leaves using a Raptor." "The tests found that a Ryobi 4-stroke leaf blower kicked out almost seven times more oxides of nitrogen (NOx) and 13.5 times more carbon monoxide (CO) than the Raptor, which InsideLine.com once dubbed "the ultimate Michigan mudslinger." An Echo 2-stroke leaf blower performed even worse, generating 23 times CO and nearly 300 times more non-methane hydrocarbons (NMHC) than the Raptor. " 10% does seem mind bogglingly high, but then when you consider just how big the efficiency gap is, and start thinking about how many people have leaf blowers, weed whackers and the like... maybe it's possible?

by anm89 6y ago

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.
  - kube-system 6y ago
    Bikes didn't require catalysts for a long time. And they often used less-precise fueling systems, like carburetors. But that has changed or is changing in a lot of places more recently.
- jascii 6y ago
  Carbon emission has an almost direct relationship to the amount of fuel burned, so assuming single occupancy, even older motorcycles do fair better than most cars in that respect. Particulate and NOX emission, not so much.
sdljfjafsd 6y ago
Practically this incorrect. When a car is in single or double occupancy (which is majority of cases) it will pollute more than a motorcycle one. Yes, a filled bus or car might be more efficient, but the average utilization on an auto is very low since most people drive them alone.
- MagnumOpus 6y ago
  You might be talking CO2 emissions where a car emits more than a bike. Pollution is a different matter though. Even the big 4-stroke tourers have worse emission control than cars; the 2-stroke motorbikes are exponentially worse in SOx/NOx/CO/particulate emissions (which hurt your lungs rather than the climate).

clusterfish 6y ago

The two stroke engines they use are terrible. I mean you mix oil into the fuel so it just burns off. No surprise that it's polluting disproportionately.

mumblemumble 6y ago

I don't know about the 10% figure, but regardless of whether you pick numbers from the high or low end of the range of estimates, the impact of lawn equipment is still staggering. 4 cycle engines make a huge difference, as do things like catalytic converters and scrubbers. 2-stroke engines, on the other hand, are both a horribly inefficient design to begin with, and also typically come fitted with absolutely no pollution controls. Also, it's not just leaf blowers. It's also lawn mowers and other gas powered lawn equipment.

jandrese 6y ago

Cars and Trucks have catalytic converters for a reason. If we were serious about this we would have mandated the same for lawn equipment (at serious expense mind you). Now I think everybody is quietly waiting for the revolution of battery powered lawn equipment to make this moot.

zdragnar 6y ago
I have a battery powered leaf blower that I wouldn't dare give up for a gas one. The ease of use and volume difference is amazing. It wouldn't be great for large commercial estates, but the runtime is more than enough for most homeowners. I have a second battery to swap and fast charge, but I also have an abnormal number of messy trees on 5 acres.
bluGill 6y ago
The revolution is obviously coming. The big manufactures probably support this as it will force their customers to replace working equipment with their new battery lines.
- Blackthorn 6y ago
  It's already here. Try the battery powered options from the usual brands (I prefer Makita), they are fantastic.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  They are already selling full product lines. For example: https://www.husqvarna.com/us/products/battery/ https://www.husqvarna.com/us/products/battery/ (I don't remember how I ended up there but I was looking at their battery products a few months ago)
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  Oh yeah, it's already here. The money to be made is huge. Used to be you'd go buy a Honda mower and it would run with practically zero maintenance for 20 years or more. Now you go get a cordless mower and replace batteries every two or three years, and the whole thing becomes obsolete pretty quickly. It's a lucrative market.

bluGill 6y ago

Emissions controls for cars, and semi-trucks started becoming a thing in the mid 1970s, and standards have got stronger over the years. There are a few collector cars around, but for the most part anything in actually use is pretty clean, emitting CO2 and H2O. (Of course CO2 has issues, but short term nothing nearly as harmful as what small engines produce) Small airplanes have not kept up (they still use lead fuel!), and so are overall worse than lawn equipment. However there is a lot more lawn equipment. (I don't know anything about modern jet engine emissions)

Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
You weren't lying. 230k planes worldwide take leaded fuel. More than half in the USA. https://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsId=14754 https://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsId=1...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

e2e8 6y ago

From the above cited paper: 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), accounting for 24%−45% of all nonroad gasoline emissions. Gasoline-powered landscape maintenance equipment (GLME; leaf blowers/vacuums, and trimmers, edgers, brush cutters) accounted for 43% of VOCs and around 50% of fine PM. Two-stroke engines were responsible for the vast majority of fine PM from GLME.

kube-system 6y ago

Note that the above is not talking about CO2. Pollutants other than CO2 are typically heavily regulated for on-road vehicles and power generation, and they have expensive systems that prevent a very significant amount of those pollutants from being emitted. For example, your cars catalyst prevents a lot of pollutants from being emitted -- but your lawnmower doesn't have this device at all. CO2 is a different story all together -- because it's the primary byproduct.

sdljfjafsd 6y ago

They are extremely wasteful. Auto manufacturers are always improving emissions on their engines but thats not the case in lawn equipment. Passenger flights and leaf blowers are two largely western luxuries that are absolutely horrible for our environment.

snarfy 6y ago

I recall reading somewhere a gas powered leaf blower emits as much CO pollution in 15 minutes as a full sized SUV does over a 1000 mile cross country trip. They are insanely dirty in comparison.

throwawayboise 6y ago

Yeah it seems nonsensical. My 2-stroke lawnmower burns maybe a pint of fuel three or four times a month or so. My car burns gallons a day. Granted the car exhaust is cleaner, but it's so much more total hydrocarbon burned.

cwkoss 6y ago

Lawn equipment tends to have proportionally huge non-CO2 pollutant emissions because they are meant to be portable and thus have been exempted from emission standards. From what I've read, it seems like lawn equipment manufacturers do not consider pollution as a parameter when designing their equipment. Electric lawn equipment has only become viable in the market in the past decade or so due to improved batteries. Now that electrification is feasible (and often nicer to use than gas-powered), seems great to ban or at least disincentivize combustion engine equipment.

cmrdporcupine 6y ago

As others have pointed out, not CO2 but other pollutants, mainly. Because of 2 stroke engines. They literally throw oil particles into the air, and burn oil mixed in with the gas. Lightweight, mechanically simple, and variable torque, but absolutely environmentally awful. And noisy.

Twirrim 6y ago

> It doesn't seem like blowers could be 10% of that no matter how you slice it. A couple of quotes from, comparing a two stroke leaf blower to a 2011 F-150 SVT Raptor: https://www.edmunds.com/about/press/leaf-blowers-emissions-dirtier-than-high-performance-pick-up-trucks-says-edmunds-insidelinecom.html https://www.edmunds.com/about/press/leaf-blowers-emissions-d... "The hydrocarbon emissions from a half-hour of yard work with the two-stroke leaf blower are about the same as a 3,900-mile drive from Texas to Alaska in a Raptor," said Jason Kavanagh, Engineering Editor at Edmunds.com. "As ridiculous as it may sound, it is more 'green' to ditch your yard equipment and find a way to blow leaves using a Raptor." "The tests found that a Ryobi 4-stroke leaf blower kicked out almost seven times more oxides of nitrogen (NOx) and 13.5 times more carbon monoxide (CO) than the Raptor, which InsideLine.com once dubbed "the ultimate Michigan mudslinger." An Echo 2-stroke leaf blower performed even worse, generating 23 times CO and nearly 300 times more non-methane hydrocarbons (NMHC) than the Raptor. " 10% does seem mind bogglingly high, but then when you consider just how big the efficiency gap is, and start thinking about how many people have leaf blowers, weed whackers and the like... maybe it's possible?