It's just a bandaid that needs to be ripped off. Like RoHS getting rid of lead solder; that was never gonna happen without regulatory intervention.
The guy who uses the $100 Home Depot weed whacker to do his own lawn is the one who gets screwed because he now either has to wrangle a cord everywhere or spend much more for equivalent performance from an electric.
(on second thought string trimmers are low enough power that a cheap battery one should work for a homeowner but for blowers, chainsaws and most other landscaping power equipment my point still stands, you gotta spend big bucks on the 36-48v stuff that performs about the same as the ICE powered $99.99 special)
Or just have the rules convert to "must not look abandoned", as long as that doesn't conflict with other existing rules. In case of conflict, the "must be lawn" rule would just disappear with no replacement.
And this isn't going to harm immigrant small businesses, because everyone's in the same boat. It's not like non-immigrant businesses get to continue using gas blowers.
Price will go up a little bit for consumers as everybody switches over to electric.
But we're not even talking a massive capital investment here. Weed whackers don't cost $50,000.
And since pretty much every vendor would have the same cost increase, it wouldn't be a competitive disadvantage from a pricing point of view. Likely the cost increase would mostly be passed on to the customer.
EDIT: Let's downvote instead of actually having a proper response. I can't wait until the bubble some of you live in pops and all of this nonsense goes away.
Also, what you add in battery charging, you easily make up with reduced maintenance of the tool.
We're speaking of people doing their lawns after all...
New theft target when each one has to carry $8k worth of batteries in the truck/trailer to have enough juice to perform their normal task, which could have been performed by two 10 gallon jugs of gasoline.
These kind of models exist since a very long time, and I was not thinking of any battery model when I wrote my comment.
If at least they do it everywhere it's possible, that would already be great. Most of the time when I am distressed by the pollution and sound of a blower/mower there is an electrical outlet handy.
For a single family home, this is fine. For townhomes, larger lot, commercial properties, this isn't as clear.
I imagine you can get some things corded still. I use battery and corded all the time, but I have gas powered as well.
In a small home (less than 1 acre) I can work around it, on the farm. It's almost all gas. Things like the blower, lawn mower, chainsaws, etc. had bad electric alternatives. We also don't and can't run, 1000 foot electrical cords all over the property.
Corded will always be the better option though. With the drills on the farm, corded offer way more torque! Just make sure you've got isolated circuits for exterior and aren't loading them down or you're popping breakers with a couple of the electric tools plugged in.
Hell, even just running a 4-stroke generator will be far less polluting.
Ruined wrists don’t have to be a thing.
Its right up there with "rules for thee and not for me".
Whether it is virtue points or an important issue is irrelevant, the way it was handled was appalling and harmful.
EDIT - If you're downvoting consider this: If you and your family were running a small landscaping business and need to replace thousands of dollars of equipment, you might feel differently. Be empathetic towards those people and consider other ways to accomplish the goal. We could just as easily have banned the sale of these after a future date. There are always options to mitigate the pressure on the affected persons.
I wonder, between the two of us, who has spent more time actually making money by doing landscaping.
A large portion of these 'businesses' are 1-2 people who scraped together whatever they could to get the equipment to make a living. Many are low income. Many sacrifice heavily in their personal lives to be able to make ends meet.
The lie here is the notion that the bunch that go the route of 'organic landscaping' are representative of the entire group.
This complaint is brought up for every single environmental improvement, and it misses the concept that the risk is an imbalance, not a change which affects everyone. For example, you used to not be able to see across the street in LA on bad smog days – and I remember plenty of people insisting that doing anything about that would devastate the economy, and yet California seems to be not exactly an impoverished wasteland.
Many run their business with the tools they can afford. Upon inspection, you would find that many such businesses have little to no resale value to lean on to make such an upgrade.
> They've likely had notice for a long time. Especially if they participate in their government.
What percentage of people laborers have the time to actively participate in government? I don't know the answer to this but I suspect it's shockingly small.
Are electric equivalents of the banned gas tools really that much more expensive?
The problem preventing commercial adoption is that if you want commercial user amounts of uninterrupted run time you wind up spending a fortune on batteries.
Of course if you are a homeowner that equipment will last a lot longer. (home owners buy a cheaper grade of quality in general, so you can't compare lifetimes with pro grade equipment)
I have personally seen such equipment remain in use for 15-20 years. When I was young the lawnmower we used was a monstrous Craftsman that was originally built 20 years prior. It was used year-round for that period for everything from snow removal, lawn mowing, and hauling landscaping supplies (retaining wall blocks and the like).
You would likely be surprised at the level of care and maintenance some small business owners put in.
We are talking about hand held stuff here though. While pros need equipment to last longer than home owners, there is a limit to how much mass they can deal with for something that is hand held.
I agree that second-order effects need to be considered, certainly. That is the point of phase-in periods, which this measure had.
Is it long enough, or substantial enough? Should small businesses be able to apply for exemptions, or interest free loans for new equipment, for example? Perhaps.
It should be uncontroversial given the facts and experiences with these engines that they are awful pollutants, terribly aggravating to communities, and that the world would be better without them.
My only point is that the way you implement change matters and that this implementation will adversely affect the worst-off population.
> It should be uncontroversial given the facts and experiences with these engines that they are awful pollutants, terribly aggravating to communities, and that the world would be better without them.
No controversy there at all.
I can easily imagine they did. Who's right? People have been raising this issue for years, the idea did not just fall out of the sky. I'm unclear why the people who have been putting up with the problem for a long time need to coddle the people creating the problem any longer.
I'm happy to see changes like this as it's something I've complained about for years; multiple properties in my area used these sort of services, and I'd frequently have to deal with the dust and dirt from their property being blown onto mine, along with noise and bad smells. I also felt bad for the operators who were exposed to that every day. So I am one of those people who has spent years nudging for a regulatory change.
Why, exactly, should anyone support a business model that can only be profitable by dumping its weaknesses on to other people? I mean, if you want to use a potentially dangerous product and the risks fall only on you, you have an absolute right to do that. But you have no right to accrue benefits while dumping the risk onto someone else.