This is part of the ongoing chronicle of a minor-seeming but conceptually significant effort in local community action. The conceptual significance, as set out mainly in this note, is that the lawn-machinery industry is an outlier in the past generation’s trend toward in tighter environmental standards and more awareness of worker-safety issues.
You can read all about that in the rest of this thread. Today, sharply diverging views on the right way to handle the seasonal bounty of leaves from the trees.
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From the National Wildlife Federation: Leave ‘em be! [Hardee har!] The full argument is here. This screenshot will give you the idea:
From a reader in Minnesota: Yeah, just leave ‘em there! The reader writes:
Leaf blowers are an admirable opponent. But I would appreciate it even more if you could point out to folks the glories of leaves laying around fertilizing the lawn (naturally) and encouraging all kinds of wonderful life.
I know it seems like too much to ask—to get people stop polluting the air with noise and dust—and then pressing them into loving a yard covered with beautiful leaves. And it is probably a step too far.
Maybe they could think about gathering up the leaves and composting them? Imagine that sweet black earth next spring.
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Hell no! Blow ‘em away! From a reader who lives in the countryside outside Washington DC, who begs to differ:
I wish you well: bravo! My advisor used to get worked up into a fury over how much oil two-stoke jet-skis drop. But I think your claim about the relative (functional—not environmental) merits of electric leaf blowers is way off, too.
I have an acre of land. Half of it is forested—I will shoot you some AMAZING red and gray fox photos which have been my obsession for years—and the other, grassy half we live on, but it has a score of old, mature trees on it; I typically take a week off work in November to rake. It doesn’t help that the land slopes drastically and has a lot of erosion problems—water has worn deep furrows in a few places and every year I landscape just a bit more to try to control it.
When we moved in, though, I resolved to use nothing but hand powered tools. Mostly that's ended up being a pride thing—it's nice to look at your full, green grass and know the force of your arm cut every single blade—but it was motivated by the idea that if I were going to live in the trees, I would like to be able to hear birds while I'm outside.
I was also curious about how folks used to do this stuff. I like hand tools. I like the mechanism that couples the wheel of a reel mower to the blades. And I hate this time of year when all the leafblowers are going all the time outside, and I can't hear birds—for that matter peoples' lawnmowers wreck my precious weekend afternoons too.
But after a couple years I made one concession, and bought a plug-in Toro leaf blower/vac. As far as I can tell it was—and might still be—the most powerful thing you can get that's corded, and it's way, way more powerful than the 40V battery set-ups. I rarely use it on the lawn—the leaves are so plentiful and the geography so bizarre that it doesn't save you that much time—but the gulleys—man, those suck. You have to do them by hand, and it takes hours and hours and hours as you squat or lie on your stomach, and if you say “the hell with it” and don't do it then when the next big rain comes it etches a lot out of your yard.
The blower makes those possible, at least within the cord range (and, 100 feet of 12-gauge cord is expensive) so I use it. And I don't merit anybody's sympathy: I mean, I chose to live in the trees, I knew it'd be work. I think if you have the opportunity to hear a wood thrush or to surprise a big ol' prehistoric-looking pileated woodpecker while you work and you give that up to fire up a lawnmower, then maybe you should give up your house to somebody who appreciates the thrush, and move to a nice condo in the city.
But, man, my retired neighbor has this gas-powered backpack blower. It is un-fricking-believable. I mean, you need hearing protection if he's using it nearby but he clears out his whole yard in like a half an hour.
Then he asks if he can do mine. I usually say no—I need the exercise —but once or twice it's felt rude, and I've let him do it, and—man, oh, man. He's like some kind of wizened old autumnal god. I'm half his age and twice his size and he can do in an hour what would take me two or three days.
So I feel pretty sure that while people should be willing, if they want to live in trees, to use more environmentally friendly tools—let’s not put out the fiction that those tools are comparable. They aren't. Gas tools are, as the kids say, the shiznit. People just gotta accept that you get all this nature but it costs you something in effort and time. Ain’t nothing free.
It’s a big complicated country. With intriguing differences between wizened old autumnal gods working their own country fields and the professional lawncare establishment. Thanks to all, more to come.
This evening the local Advisory Neighborhood Commission for our part of D.C. voted 8-1 to endorse the proposals from our community group, as described in previous items in this thread, to move the District of Columbia away from use of (grossly polluting, very noisy, hazardous to lawn crews) gas-powered leafblowers. They even amended our proposed resolution to make it stronger, in ways I’ll describe when I can check the official text tomorrow.
There are many steps ahead, but this is an important and very welcome one. Sincere thanks for their time, attention, questions, suggestions, and support to Chairman Smith and Commissioners Spencer, Gates, Gold, Gardner, Wells, Lucero, and Ross, and to the members of our community group. Further reports as the process goes on.
In response to the item immediately below, which kicked off this Thread, I’ve gotten reports from different corners of the country. My intention with the thread-organization here is to have a running chronicle, or billboard, of news and developments pro and con.
This item is about two-stroke engines, which North Americans and Europeans now encounter with gas-powered leafblowers (and some other lawn equipment) but otherwise aren’t in widespread use in developed countries any more. If you’ve spent time in Southeast Asia, India, much of Africa, or other parts of the developing world, you know these engines as the put-putting source that powers scooters, some jeepneys, the motorized tricycles known as tuk-tuks, etc.
A motorized rickshaw in Ethiopia. In much of Asia these are known as tuk-tuks. They’re powered by two-stroke engines, as are lawn equipment and leafblowers in the United States. (Wikipedia)
You find two-stroke engines in poorer countries because they’re cheap. You don’t find them in richer countries because they’re so dirty and polluting. An NIH study in 2004 estimated that two-stroke engines were, by themselves, a major source of air pollution and pollution-related health problems, throughout Asia. Without getting into details, the main reason for the difference is that two-stroke engines are much less efficient in combustion than four-stroke engines (which are standard in cars); they burn a mix of oil and gasoline; and they emit a lot of this combustion mixture directly into the atmosphere, unburned.
For this reason, the EPA and other state and federal agencies have put increasing pressure on the boating industry to phase out, ban, or (in some cases) dramatically clean up two-stroke boat engines. Here is a sample directive from the National Park Service, about why they can’t be used for some kinds of watercraft in Lake Mead and Lake Mohave:
National Park Service directive against two-stroke engines (NPS).
And here is a chart from the Oregon State Marine Board about the way the ban cut the proportion of two-stroke outboard engines on the state’s waters from 70% to 51% in the first three years. I haven’t yet seen later charts, but presumably the trend goes on. Similar trends apply to motorcycles in rich countries, which used to have a lot of two-stroke models and now have very few.
In the decades since the dawning of the world environmental movement in the early 1970s, rich and poor countries alike have steadily increased efforts to make car engines, truck engines, aircraft engines, railroad systems, heating and cooling systems, power generation, and most other forms of combustion energy cleaner year by year. A sign that a country is rich is that it has done more in this direction. One more burden of being poor is skies that are dark and unhealthy.
The main, anomalous remnants of poor-country pollution standards in the developed world are the two-stroke engines we encounter more often on leafblowers than anywhere else. (Also some noisy two-stroke generators.) We don’t use them in cars; we rarely use them in motorcycles; we’re moving away from them in boats. But their use is increasing in our neighborhoods.
Cruelly, in the richest neighborhoods of rich countries, it is often immigrants from poorer countries, on landscaping crews, who are carrying this equipment and spending the day in its fumes.
What about the place where our children were born and where they finished high school, where we own a house and have lived for more years than anyplace else: Washington D.C.? Don’t we have an obligation to keep pitching in too? The District is the site of national / international struggles but also of intense local involvement. Over the years, our local involvement has been mainly with our immediate neighborhood and with youth sports leagues and the public schools, when our children were there.
Recently we have become part of a new group involved in a small-seeming but significant aspect of D.C. neighborhood reality: the relatively recent omnipresence of gas-powered leafblowers as the raucous background sound of daily life.
For me, at least, this is an old complaint. What’s new, I have learned, is both a negative and a positive development.
The negative one is increasing evidence about the public health and environmental damage that the two-stroke engines used in these devices can do. According to an automotive-analyst study, running a gas-powered two-stroke leafblower for 30 minutes creates pollutants equivalent to driving a Ford F-150 pickup truck for more than 3800 miles. (How can this be? Normal car and truck engines, gasoline-powered or diesel, have been heavily regulated and dramatically cleaned up. Dirty old two-stroke engines are the outlier.) According to other studies this past summer, the extremely high-velocity (200 mph+) winds out of a leafblower disperse toxins, mold, fungi, particles of animal feces, and other pollutants into a dust that hurts the blower-operators most of all but affects the whole neighborhood. The intense winds can also destroy topsoil. An EPA report this past summer discussed the toxins and potential carcinogens to which the blower-users themselves are exposed. The research literature on this theme is vast. For the moment, our neighborhood flyer is here; a pioneering report from the California Air Resources Board is here; a searchable index to EPA reports on leaf blowers is here; and a letter from pediatricians at Mt. Sinai Hospital urging restrictions on gas-powered blowers on public-health grounds is here.
The positive development is the rapid progress in electric leaf blowers, both corded and battery-powered. The electric models are quieter, because there’s no combustion noise; and they are dramatically less polluting, because their power is from the steadily-more-regulated electric grid rather than these godawful two-stroke motors. Recent breakthroughs in battery life, like those I wrote about here, have made them more practical as alternatives.
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So we’re going to start at the closest-to-the-neighborhood level of local government, the Advisory Neighborhood Commission, to ask for a consideration of: the new and mounting evidence of health effects, especially on lawn-crew workers; the feasibility of at least enforcing existing noise ordinances (routinely exceeded by a factor of 10); and the possibility of joining other cities in a shift to allowing electric leafblowers only, rather than the noisy and super-polluting two-stroke gas models.
To my mind, shifting toward a different leafblower regime is like requiring dog owners to clean up after their pets. It would be easier for the owners if they didn’t have to do so, but that is not fair to everyone else.
It’s also like asking people who buy clothes made in Haiti or electronics made in China to pay attention to the conditions in which those goods are made, rather than just pushing for the cheapest price. Or asking people who buy grapefruit from Florida and vegetables from the California Central Valley to think about the pesticides and toxins to which farm workers are exposed. The mindset I’m most determined to turn around is the idea that concern on this front is a “first world problem.” The real first-world attitude is: Hey, it’s fine for these (low-paid, and in our area generally non-English-speaking) lawn guys to hear this noise and breathe these fumes, while we’re downtown at the office or away for the weekend. The lawn looks great when we come back!
We’ll see, and report, where this goes. The hearing at the Advisory Neighborhood Commission in our part of D.C. is tonight.
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