The WAMU story includes some other arguments, pro and con, about the legislation that D.C. Councilmember Mary Cheh has introduced to speed the inevitable transition away from two-stroke gas blowers. (Inevitable? Yes: capital cities of nations like Thailand, Indonesia, and Cambodia are already phasing out these engines as unacceptably polluting. Sooner or later America’s capital will catch up. Also, the government-mandated use of ethanol in fuel, which is crazy from a public-policy perspective, has the additional effect of being very hard on two-stroke engines and makes them increasingly impractical.)

The weakest “con” argument in the report, for what it’s worth, is the claim by some lawn companies that if they can’t use two-stroke gas engines, they’ll stop doing business in D.C. There are already companies here using cleaner, dramatically quieter electric equipment. I’m sure they’d be happy with more business; and while people debate whether Say’s Law is true (“supply creates its own demand”), almost everyone agrees that demand creates supply. But listen to the report and see what you think.

***

Meanwhile, as a prelude to our upcoming American Futures report on the Maker Movement, and as yet another illustration of the Atlantic’s commitment to serving our readers, here’s a constructive seasonal suggestion about leafblower use. It explains how you can turn yours into a “snowball machine gun”:

Thanks to reader D.S. for this tip.

Now, the new developments: One is the latest story from a publication that has consistently done a good job of covering the merits, the economics, the scientific arguments, and the politics of the issue: the local Current newspapers in D.C.  The front-page story by Brady Holt in the latest issue, which you can see in a PDF here. It’s about the next steps the City Council may consider, and the forces pro and con.

The other is a story by Perry Stein in the Washington Post, which ran online last week and in the Sunday print paper yesterday. As Chris Bodenner summed up in a Note when the online version appeared, this article frames the leafblower issue as a personality story, in which the personality happens to be me. That wasn’t what I expected the story to be about when talking with the reporter, to put it mildly,  but this is life in the realm of Civic Engagement! The story does set out how and why my wife and I happened to become involved in an effort that a number of other people here locally had begun.

***

I’ve been away from the online world for quite a while, on a big push for a cover story in the March issue of the magazine. More about that anon, and on other topics starting later today. Thanks to those writing to ask whether I’d left to join the circus, keeled over, become a lama or a freight pilot, etc.

***

Also in recent press coverage is a letter in the latest issue of the Current newspapers (page 8 of the PDF here). It is from D.C. resident Joey Spatafora and addresses a local political figure who said he opposed any change in leafblower rules:

Multiple apartment complexes and an assisted-living facility nearby all employ landscaping contractors who use gasoline-powered leaf blowers for “general upkeep” of the grounds, in which they rarely — if ever — actually pick up anything. The leaf blowers are being used as a sort of gasoline- powered broom to “sweep” lawns, sidewalks, driveways — any surface that they want to “manicure.”

Nothing pierces the constant din of Connecticut Avenue traffic, trucks, ambulances, fire engines and accidents like a gasoline-powered leaf blower…. This is not the same quality of noise produced by lawn mowers, weed wackers, et cetera. This is a different spectrum and decibel level of sound. I do not believe that homeowners — or, more importantly, apartment complexes and landscaping companies that do business in D.C. — have the right to inject high-frequency, high-decibel noise into my apartment almost daily at such a level that I cannot even conduct a simple business phone call or concentrate on work.

There are reasonable, effective, community-friendly alternatives. Please talk to the maintenance staff at the Ponce de Leon and Parker House buildings on upper Connecticut Avenue, my heroes. The grounds manager there will talk to you about the benefits of low-noise electric leaf blowers — no spark plugs, gasoline, backpack or earplugs to hassle with, and just $70 at Lowe’s.

As mentioned throughout these reports, I originally was sensitized to leafblowers because of the noise, which like Spatafora I find uniquely disconcerting. But I decided it was worth trying to do something only when I learned about the public-health issues — and, crucially, the emergence of new, cleaner, quieter alternatives. We’ll let you know what comes next.

Believe it or not on the “seen but not heard” front, they are right. By (rarely enforced) Washington D.C. law, noise from leaf blowers cannot be more than 70 decibels, at a distance of 50 feet. Routinely with gas-powered blowers, the noise is five times louder than that, from five times farther away. (How do I know? We’ve measured.)

But yesterday a crew using two new BGA 100 blowers created noise only in the mid-50s decibel range, from a distance of 25 feet. Because the decibel scale, like the Richter scale, works logarithmically, this means that the noise was dramatically lower than conventional gas-powered blowers. (Technically it means that the “sound pressure level” was less than one-tenth as great). Over the years, from a writing office inside our house, I have been aware the instant leaf blowers start up in the surrounding blocks. Today I asked my wife Deb when the crew was going to turn their machines on — only to learn that they had been running in our front yard for the previous 20 minutes. I had not heard them start.

By safety regulations the crew members were required to wear protective glasses and to have their battery packs properly strapped on, which they did — but not required to wear ear protection, because it wasn’t needed. And of course there were no gas-engine fumes or emissions.

A D.C.-area lawn-care firm called A.I.R. had just bought a new set of the Stihl BGA 100 blowers and used them at our house. (It also is putting solar panels on the roof of its equipment truck, to re-charge the batteries.) Could these quiet blowers possibly be up to the job? We had a yardful of heavy, sodden leaves, and they got easily whooshed around like so:

Thank you, Stihl company! (This is not a sentence I had ever imagined myself writing.) And there’s even more good news from the industry. According to a trade publication, GreenIndustryPros,  Stihl says that the battery-innovation age is upon us. The article reported that the BGA 100 “is the lightest handheld blower, at 5.5 pounds, and is the quietest in the Stihl line at 56 [decibels].” It then quoted a Stihl senior product manager named Kent Hall:

“I think that you’re going to see more and more, industry wide, battery products being introduced into the market. It’s almost, as some people refer to it, a battery frenzy. Manufacturers have suddenly gotten caught up in this battery tsunami focus,” says Hall. “So I think you’re just going to see more and more existing companies expand their battery range, like Stihl has.”

Thank you, battery-technology innovators! Thank you A.I.R.! Yes, once more, thank you Stihl!! The arc of lawn care is long, but it bends away from two-stroke engines.

2. You mentioned that the absence of regulation means low-wage immigrant laborers are exposed to pollution. Has it ever occurred to suburban Republicans who hate immigrants worse than strychnine poisoning that there is a thing called supply and demand?

How many of them hire lawn services, which are probably the biggest single source of employment for Latin American male immigrants? In a decade or so, many of them will be filing for SSI disability payments based on occupational hearing loss (hearing protection is often nonexistent). And having a madly vibrating backpack blower strapped to one’s body several hours a day, day after day, will certainly cause neuromuscular disorders over time.

3. Whether commercial or do-it-yourself, does no one know how to operate the marvelous contrivance called a leaf rake anymore? It’s good exercise, and I find it is more efficient for gathering up leaves.

4. In the age of Amazon, the number of loud, diesel-powered delivery vans coursing through residential areas seems to have increased by an order of magnitude. A large van would seem to have ample space for an abundant battery pack. There is no reason why vans on a fixed itinerary could not be battery-electric powered.

5. The DOT-mandated back-up beepers of the commercial vehicles and construction vehicles (like Bobcats and backhoes) that have proliferated in suburbia are, in some instances, piercingly loud. I recall one case of a beeper that could be heard a half mile away. Back-up cameras and/or pedestrian avoidance systems could in some cases alleviate the noise problem. [JF note: ah, back-up beeps…..]

To test my hypothesis, I went on a two-mile walk this afternoon. It was impossible to be out of earshot of the racket generated by commercial landscaping services. These operations are creating externalities that we will pay for later, quite apart from their damage to tranquility and privacy.

***

For a different perspective, a reader who used to live outside Boston and now lives in further-north New England. She writes:

First, whether fall leaves will disintegrate over the winter and fertilize your lawn depends entirely on what kind of tree we're talking about, and maybe how cold your climate is.  Maple and even more so oak leaves are remarkably resistant to decomposition.  Leave a large quantity of either on your lawn and you'll have a matted mess in the spring and patches of no grass at all.  Even putting them in the compost is problematic.  And they can cause rot of the crowns of perennials if they're not pulled back early in spring.

Shredded, either by the lawnmower or a shredder that's at least as noisy as a blower, they're great stuff for mulch and compost, but by themselves, they're murder (at least in northern areas with real winters and snow cover and stuff).  So just leaving them be isn't as easy an option as it sounds in many cases.

Secondly, I'm guessing this won't be as much of a problem in your neighborhood, but in my old home town, an inner suburb of Boston , the attempt by some residents to get some simple regulation on hours of use blew up into a full-scale civil war in the town that raged for a couple of years between the long-time "townies" and the more recent, more "professional class" arrivals.

The townies took the side of the little landscaper outfits, who understandably wanted to be able to do their work in town at their convenience…. There had been, as in many gradually gentrifying suburban communities, simmering resentments between the two sides for many years, but this leaf-blower thing blew it wide open.  

I understand the neighborhood-cleavage potential. In our area, the natural axis would not be newcomer/previous resident but rather one based on working patterns. People who are at downtown offices all day, or often away on weekends, would be on one side. On the other, people at home with children, or working at home, or working nights, or retired, or disabled, or for other reasons present during the day.

This potential for ill-will is why I’ve stayed out of this issue until very recently. (While personally not liking the omnipresent noise, and not working at home any more because of it. I wrote a book in 1993 and another in 1996 mainly at my home office in Washington. The ones since then I’ve mainly written elsewhere.)

What’s changed recently, for me, is the evidence that these two-stroke gas-powered noisy leafblower engines really are an anomaly. Because of their inefficiency and hyper-polluting nature (30 minutes of leafblower use creates pollutants comparable to driving a pickup truck 3800 miles), they’ve been banned or phased out in most other uses. For more than a decade the EPA has been prohibiting them as boat motors. Motorcycle and scooter makers make very few any more. Countries like Thailand and Indonesia are trying to clean their air in part by getting rid of two-stroke engines (as explained here). They anachronistically persist in widespread first-world use mainly on lawn crews, which is bad for public health in general but most of all for the lawn-crew members themselves.

At the same time as legal and environmental momentum has increased against the dirty two-stroke engines, the electric alternatives have been becoming more plausible, thanks to improvements in battery technology and other innovations. The switch will come sooner or later, and in my view it is worth trying to nudge it along.

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.

***

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:

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.

***

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.

***

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.