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Comment by porb121 | Hacker News Reader

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 gas-powered lawn equipment, and they produce >30%* of the non-car pollutants.

Traditional American lawn maintenance is a horribly unsustainable (and in my opinion, ugly) practice. We should encourage alternatives.

See: Banks, "National Emissions from Lawn and Garden Equipment"

View on HN

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Makita puts the protection/charge control circuitry in the battery pack, instead of in the tool or the charger. That makes their batteries more expensive, but you can't kill them by running them dry or through overheating in use. The pack itself will cut power to the tool. Makes them much more robust than the other common consumer/prosumer brands (not sure about pro brands like Hilti and Fein).

Though not uncommon this is simply a faulty product. Running them empty should not lock them out.

I left a battery on the charger for too long and it became a paperweight.

This kinda soured me on electric lawn equipment for a while.

This is epitomized for me by the one guy in Santa Clara who I saw blow a single leaf an entire block rather than pick it up. I was already annoyed by their incredibly loud and inefficient landscaping and that just took the cake.

Was somebody following him filming it for TikTok?

Sadly, this is quite normal behaviour. As a species we have a long way to go...

Blows my mind how many shops in Western states water their sidewalk daily with a hose with the state of the water supply over there. It would be so simple to fine these shops.

How about charging them a fair price for the water they use, and letting them decide if that's worth it or find alternatives if it's not?

Can't speak for all of the Western states, but in SF it's basic hygiene to get piss off the sidewalk so that your store doesn't smell like it. Maybe there is a less wasteful way though, not sure.

"Can't speak for all of the Western states, but in SF it's basic hygiene to get piss off the sidewalk" This cracks me up. As someone who lives in a Eastern state I sincerely hope that doesn't speak for all western states, I've never heard of that.

No. It’s mainly just SF and To some degree parts of CA. It’s getting pretty bad in many parts of SF

Clearly you've never been to Manhattan or Boston!! Plenty of pungent smells in the East too. It just rains more.

In LA you would think it would be for the piss too, but it seems mostly to get off small leaves and dirt from the sidewalk that might take you ten extra minutes to sweep instead up, and you see it both in areas with encampments and without.

It shouldn't as the vast majority of water is wasted growing fruits and vegetables in what is basically desert/semi-desert areas. Watering lawns and sidewalks is small potatoes in comparison, yet very few people complain about the 80% problem and preach to their neighbors about the 20% issue.

If you live in a suburban area like I do, practically every day one of the neighbors has these running. And half the time it's just blowing it to the street to later land on someone else's property.

Yeah, it's gotten a little better recently(dunno if it's just because of weather), but there was a long stretch where every day I would go out to my backyard and, on any given day of the week, there was someone mowing or weed whacking nearby. Weed whacking is almost worse because people love to "rev" the weed whacker constantly instead of just holding down the button. But yeah, it almost entirely ruins the suburban experience for me because there are so few moments when you can just sit outside during the day without having some obnoxious motor running somewhere.

Then again, I'm also averse to the lengths people go through to maintain landscaping. Landscaping is necessary, but so many homeowners care so much about property values that they want everything to constantly appear uniform. Some neighbors even rat on each other to their HOA if one person went an extra week without mowing.

Yeah, I just recently moved to SF and it's a lot quieter in the city than it was in the suburbs.

The irony.

save for screams of demented people. closer to downtown, of course, but increasingly prevalent.

Those screams exist in Palo Alto too - just mostly in the city council meetings.

> because people love to "rev" the weed whacker constantly instead of just holding down the button.

With at least the weedwhacker I have, there's not really an option. If you hold the button down, it overheats. If you leave it up to long, it shuts off. As a result, any time I'm walking across pavement, or in between patches that need weedwhacking, I have to rev the stupid thing.

I agree with everything you've said though. I don't have a choice right now, but the way suburban/urban landscaping is done is a nightmare.

> I have to rev the stupid thing.

Or get a new one if you can afford it. They're not terribly expensive.

I can't :)

It's also not technically mine.

Ahhh.... I remember when we used rakes.

Happy days. Then some guy decided all tools should be 'powered' and here we are.

Who would have figured that the invisible hand of the market was pushing a lawnmower.

I hardly ever see a user of a blower actually blow stuff into a pile and pick it up. This is the part that makes me crazy. The wind is just going to blow it right back to where it was!

I've seen that happen right before a hurricane. Wind was already gusting, roughly at tropical storm levels. The full force of a category 3 was just a few hours away. There was my neighbor, blowing leaves from his driveway.

That's exactly how I see pretty much every professional gardener use them.

As far as noise goes, a lot of the noise is from the fan. The electric blowers are still pretty noisy.

They’re much quieter though. I have an Ego backpack blower and I can use it without ear protection for short periods.

No way, there is a SIGNIFICANT difference in noise between a gas powered weed whacker and an electric one. The only thing you hear in the latter is the bzzzzzzz which is a lot easier to deal with than a screaming 2 stroke.

GP mentioned leaf blowers, not weed whippers. Of course electric weed whippers are quieter.

Electric is always going to be quieter. Period. The sound of the fan is not the major contributor to noise. It's the loud ass two stroke.

It's both. Obviously, electric leafblowers will be quieter than 2-stroke leafblowers, but that doesn't make them quiet in any way. Just like electric cars are still loud at high speed and freeways will always be loud, because wind and tires make way more noise than any normal car engine crusing at 2000 rpm.

It's not the same, because cars have mufflers, and are MUCH quieter than your leaf blower during operation. Of course you're not going to eliminate all noise, but they are significantly reduced without an engine. Can't really compare a freeway to your neighborhood lawn care.

A quick google shows that electric blowers are 75% quieter than gas ones by decibel. In fact, they're comparable to using a hair dryer (around 70 dB):

Source: http://leafblowernoise.com/Electric%20blower%20sound.htm

So I would refute your claim.

The electric ones also move significantly less air. I say this as the owner of a top of the line electric blower that will never in a million years own a gas one. The gas ones are far superior for actually blowing large amounts of leaves or large areas, but I'm totally content to pick up most leaves on the lawn when I mow and use the blower just for hard-to rake areas. That works very well.

You can find electric ones which match pretty closely to similarly sized gas counterparts.

Husqvarna 525BX 25-cc 2-Cycle 192-MPH 493-CFM Handheld Gas Leaf Blower https://www.lowes.com/pd/Husqvarna-525BX-25-cc-2-Cycle-192-M...

EGO POWER+ 180-MPH Brushless Handheld Cordless Electric Leaf Blower, 500-600CFM https://www.lowes.com/pd/EGO-Power-56-Volt-Lithium-Ion-Brush...

I’ll refute yours. I own an electric. It’s insanely loud. I don’t need hearing protection for my blow dryer but I certainly do for my electric leaf blower.

Anyone who sincerely believes electric leaf blowers are - on average - even close to as loud as gas-powered blowers has to be arguing on the smallest of small sample sizes or bad faith. They're not comparable, there's a reason community-driven pushes to ban leaf blowers focus on those with combustion engines.

Can an electric leaf blower be as loud as a gas-powered one? Sure. I'm sure under the right circumstances a Prius can make noise comparable to Corolla too. Electric leaf blowers aren't silent and are often loud, but not aggravatingly loud. They won't make your next-door neighbors lose their mind, much less your neighbors two doors down.

The above poster isn't saying electric models are quiet, just that they are quieter than a similar gas model. Which makes sense when you think about it. Both of them probably have similar air turbulence noise of the blower part, but an electric motor is almost always way quieter than a bunch of pistons rattling about and having fuel-air mixture detonations.

Yes, absolutely. So irritating.

Noise pollution is one of those places where I am seriously conflicted. It’s one of those cases where you feel like it’s regulating common curtesy.

See also: Harley Davidson mentality.

What is your conflict?

I'm not the previous person, but I assume they mean that not everything about life should be regulated. There are actually some real practical problems with this, because life is complicated and has an endless list of edge cases that can't possibly be captured in law.

Every law your government passes is another nail in the coffin of personal freedom, so they must be carefully considered. Every liberal democracy will eventually die but we don't have to hasten it by making every new law "for the public good". I'm not saying what Oakland is doing is good or bad, but every new law should be carefully considered and I think that a lot of people forget that everytime the government makes you do something that means you lost another bit (or chunk) of freedom. See the Patriot Act for instance, we may never recover from that it severely damages and continues to damage individual rights and privacy as the primary cudgel the US government uses to justify unconstitutional surveillance of Americans.

Its like passing a law prohibiting farting in an elevator or wearing too much perfume. Fundamentally who is going to enforce it? Do we want to have police out there chasing people with blowers and wearing so much perfume you can smell them from half a block away?

Yet people do these things which are infuriating and intrude on those around them without a thought.

I own a battery operated trimmer and blower, and unfortunately, they’re not much quieter (I hear my neighbors, too). In fact, they almost seem more annoying as they seem to emit a different frequency.

Agree with things to reduce noise pollution, but don’t feel like this will help much in that regard.

The electric ones i've seen are still damn noisy. If you want to make a fan worth a damn to move leaves and debris, you are gonna make some noise no matter how it's powered, evidenced by the fact that it's recommended to wear ear protection still with electric lawn care equipment.

The bigger issue imo is that we incentivize the wrong things. Money and time instead of quality and a job well done. It's faster to blow loudly than to rake silently. A silent landscaping company powered by reel mowers and rakes would clear less properties per man hour, but maybe there is in fact a market there for that premium, nearly silent service.

> As much as the environmental impact is significant, I'm mainly enthused because I really dislike the impact of the noise pollution

Noise pollution is an environmental impact.

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-...

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.

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.

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.

Right, like auto makers would never put a phone style interface right into their cars, so that people could avoid "distracted driving" by hooking their phone up to their car and using the car's touch screen legally instead of the phone's. Only insane hobbyists would do that, as it combines the worse aspects of the requiring human touch and distraction to operate with the slow technology release cycle of auto manufacturers.

And once people actually start trying to do, then it would be a great time to address it in a law.

There are practically infinite bad things that someone could possibly do. You can't outlaw them all.

> the law should be written to ban both using a phone or playing harmonica while driving without specifically mentioning either, except perhaps as examples.

Slippery slope arguments shouldn’t apply to specific provisions in the law that target likely scenarios.

Let’s say you said that the driver shouldn’t drive distracted. You have now outlawed listening to radio, music, or others talking in a way not conducive to giving full attention to the car, perhaps even while the car is being driven automatically, if there is any chance of the driver needing to drive manually such that they must be ready to drive.

That said, I agree that the method of generating the outcome need not always be defined. For example, in some legislation, companies/vendors are named specifically, which may lead to de facto support by the government of some private institutions, which seems anticompetitive.

We do indeed see infotainment systems in cars that are the direct analogues of cell phones and cause distracted driving. They even connect to the phones and give similar touch screen apps.

These systems are legal but using the phone is not, so this really is a great example of trying to regulate technology rather than outcomes. All that happens is vendors put ports in their cars and route the phone interface to the driver in a fixed screen rather than in the phone's screen. Regulation bypassed.

This makes enforcement simple.

Setting emission thresholds means needing to get out there and perform spot checks in the field. It's specialised, expensive and in practise means many people just flouting the law and getting away with it. Pointless law.

Simply banning ICE strimmers and blowers means any enforcement officer can easily cite rule breakers, confiscate equipment, etc.

And per sibling, not the same as mandating one technology, at all.

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.

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.

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.

Those points are mainly true of back yards, not really front yards though.

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).

Plants, grass, and trees are pretty. People tend to feel good looking at them rather than just concrete, asphalt, and plastic. Lawns attract birds and bees and butterflies and bugs. I don't think there's any real mystery about why people like lawns.

Well, small proviso: yards with (flowering) plants attract birds, bugs, etc. Wide expanses of constantly-mowed grass lawn do not so much.

The grass part of my yard feeds many rabbits and birds (grass and worms, respectively). Other than when covered with snowpack, it’s rare to go two days without seeing a rabbit and birds are feeding every morning, especially after rains (that bring the worms higher). This is in a small city yard that’s mostly grass.

Sure, rabbits are happy enough with mowed grass, but if you asked them, they'd probably rather you didn't cut the tender tips off all the time. :) And the species of birds that hunt worms in the ground are a very small subset of what you could find in a city. (I would venture you're mostly seeing robins.)

that's an argument for a nice garden you find in the British countryside, but the manicured American suburban lawn looks like something ordered out of an ecommerce store, factory produced. Actually urban concrete jungle is more interesting.

Unless you've got an HOA or a city or county law that requires you to water your lawn, or are in a place with very low rainfall, it should be safe to skip watering the lawn most of the time.

A lawn should be able to go 4 weeks with no water in the summer and not die. It will go dormant, and once the water starts again it will green up quickly. A dormant lawn will be brown and you shouldn't walk on it much, but if you don't need to do things on it and aren't bothered aesthetically by it, it's fine.

Once it goes brown, water it maybe every 3 weeks just to make sure it doesn't go from dormant to dead if you don't get enough rain.

I've always hated lawns too - house after house with the same kind of pointless, perfectly manicured square of green. The waste of all the water and energy, all the chemicals used to keep out anything but grass. I mean, it may as well be astroturf given it's always kept looking like it!

I fully agree that some vegetation looks nice, and is good for insects and birds. But I'd much prefer some variety at least - different grasses, wildflowers, moss, clover, local plants, and not kept permanently trimmed 3mm off the earth. I mentioned this to my wife a few years back, and she looked at me like I'd gone crazy, and I've had the same aghast looks from others too.

Actually, I'd like to see some proposals for regulation around this. Homogeneous lawns are just such a colossal waste.

That's only what happens in the bougie suburbs. Literal teams of professional staff making putting greens in front of stately homes, because keeping grass that thick and low takes a lot of regular work. Most places that aren't a desert or Mediterranean climate in the US don't need their lawns watered, rain is frequent enough, and grass might only need to be cut 1-2 times a week if that, depending on the rains. Overall, even in places that need sprinklers like CA, sprinkler systems don't use much water relative to other strains on the water system such as industry. It might be foolhardy to grow a lawn where the heat is regularly exceeding 100*, however, because you will practically have to water multiple times a day to keep up with the hot ground baking out the water.

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.

CO and CO2 are different things, it's worth noting.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's already here. Try the battery powered options from the usual brands (I prefer Makita), they are fantastic.

They are already selling full product lines. For example:

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)

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.

Gas mowers are definitely not zero maintenance, at least not past 10 years. I've replaced my fair share of gaskets & spark plugs, cleaned out intakes, and spent 20m screwing with the choke to get the damn things started.

I went pure electric 5 years ago with no problems. Starts up every time with the push of a button and since I bought a set, it came with multiple batteries so I can swap them out before fully depleting one for extended life.

Ethanol in gas has had a seriously deleterious effect on lawn equipment. So many carbs full of gooey nasty rubber residue. My local Home Depot has started carrying cans of ethanol free gasoline because there are literally no gas stations in the county that carry it anymore.

It's bad when you're looking at some piece of equipment and are relieved to discover that it has been sitting with gas in it since the 90s. At least there is a hope the rubber bits are intact.

On the other hand, this is so common now that the aftermarket carb business has become a mass market. You can buy chinese knockoffs carbs with all of the hoses and plastic bits for like $10 on Amazon now.

There are gas stations that sell ethanol free gas.

Closest one to me according to pure-gas.org is about an hour away, a couple of counties over. There are literally none in the county. I don't know if that's local law or market forces in action.

That isn't ethanol. That is the cheaper grade of gas they use with ethanol rotting faster. (Ethanol is high octane, you cannot use the same molecules in non-ethanol gas as you can in ethanol) So yes, ethanol free gas lasts longer, but it isn't because it is ethanol free, it is because the gas is better quality.

Aftermarket carbs are cheap because carbs are cheap. You can buy a lawn mower at WalMart for $100, and everyone has to make a profit. That means the engine can't cost more than $20, and the carb must be less than that. The Chinese make a nice profit selling new carbs for $10, even though most carbs still go to the engine manufactures who pay a lot less in quantity.

Ethanol has been common enough in gas since the 90s.In the early years there were problems with it attacking rubber. That rubber hasn't been used in fuel systems for years though.

Tell that to all of the carbs I find full of fossilized nasty black tar.

I guess everyone has a different experience, then. I made a sport out of trying to kill an old Briggs & Stratton lawn mower by doing no maintenance at all. Running old gas, never changing the oil or anything else, just didn't care. It wouldn't die. Well, except for the self-propelled part, that was always a nuisance. But the engine was indestructible [0]. I finally retired it after 20 years due to rust, but the engine was still going fine.

I have my share of electric battery-powered lawn equipment, but I've already gone through one generation of batteries which rendered the old equipment obsolete. And the markup on batteries is on the order of 500% compared to what a generic battery of similar chemistry would cost. It's an excellent racket, very profitable.

I wonder about the people here on HN buying Ryobi stuff... maybe they're onto something. Normally I wouldn't touch Ryobi with a ten foot pole, because it's trash. But OTOH, it's cheap, so maybe the quality of the tool will match up with the expected availability of batteries so the TCO isn't as offensive.

[0] If you haven't seen those old videos where B&S demonstrates why the Slick 50 demos were BS, you should. Lawnmower engines are way overbuilt, mostly as an artifact of their small size. They're hard to kill.

The revolution is already here. I had gas powered weedwackers as a kid. Nowadays I own an 18v brushless Makita. It's fantastic, almost as powerful as the gas one was...and they also make 36v and 80v versions that are beyond powerful enough for any job.

Those higher voltage weedwackers are very impressive. I've used one that was somewhere north of 40v, and it was closer to a brush-cutter than a weedwacker. I had to turn it down to a lower setting to prevent damaging the things I was trimming around.

I own a mix. I absolutely love my electric leaf blower and electric chainsaw. But I own both an electric and a gas-powered string trimmer. The electric one is every bit as powerful as the gas one, and it's much nicer to use. But it doesn't have the runtime to do the large steep slope further away from the house. For the big jobs I tend to dual-wield, using a blade on one and a string on the other. If I hadn't inherited the gas-powered one, I'd probably just have more batteries for the electric one.

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)

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=1...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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-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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

(Edited)

I assume you mean:

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".

page 7 and figure 2, "GLGE represented nearly 4% of All Emissions of VOCs and 12% of All Emissions of CO"

Carbon Monoxide (CO) does not cause climate change. (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.)

i did not say anything about climate change

So then I can only assume you included the carbon monoxide number because it was ... large?

it's a pollutant, and the primary pollutant of gas lawn equipment.

It includes boat motors.

I expect the non-particulate emissions are dominated by 2 stroke motors (well, other than CO₂).

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.

The meeting is probably very interesting and they want to peek? :)

Could not agree more.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Ah, fast growing and thick, yeah. I had to mow every week and could push it to 2-3 in very dry weather.

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.

This is probably the best outcome. Home users limited to electric, commercials pushed to 4 stroke where possible, and then set hours of lawn care noise during the day. Though you'd need carve outs for the size of property for homes, which starts getting into confusion territory.

A sample of leaf blowers sold in the UK [1] shows power ratings of 2500-3000W. They will use the standard 240V power supply.

Don't most American houses have at least one 240V socket in the garage, for use with garden/garage equipment? (Otherwise, where do you plug in an electric car if you're visiting relatives, for example?)

[1] https://www.argos.co.uk/browse/garden-and-diy/lawnmowers-and...

>Don't most American houses have at least one 240V socket in the garage, for use with garden/garage equipment?

Newer ones, depending on location.

>(Otherwise, where do you plug in an electric car if you're visiting relatives, for example?)

You charge on 120v or you don't charge.

No. Most US houses have, at most, a single 240V outlet in the laundry room for an electric dryer. Literally everything else is 120V. There is almost no household equipment other than drying machines that is sold taking a 240V plug.

Electric cars may change this. They haven't yet, at least not much.

You forgot the outlet for the electric range, so 2 outlets for most US homes.

Ah, you're right. Doubled! :D

(The important thing to note for non-US-dwelling folks is that your average American simply never deals with plugs other than 120V except for rare circumstance, like appliance replacement or adding a car charging portal.)

Corded can be kind of a pain if your yard is at all odd-shaped. They also really aren't that powerful.

This battery-operated one works well and is also much quieter than the gas-powered ones.

https://www.homedepot.com/p/RYOBI-125-MPH-550-CFM-40-Volt-Li...

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.

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.

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...

Consider putting your computer indoors!

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.

They're banned in LA but people still use them

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).

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).

Not to mention they're just fucking annoying to listen to all day in the summer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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