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Comment by amluto | Hacker News Reader

There might be better bang for the buck by starting with the more highly polluting things. Other than CO2, things like leaf blowers are _vastly_ worse than cars. Also, excellent electric leaf blowers are widely available and appear (at least at my local Home Depot) to be _less_ expensive than their gas equivalents. I see no reason for a 5-year phaseout — one year ought to be plenty.

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I’m from europe and i have no idea what a leaf blower is. Our family didn’t have one nor did any family I know of. My family always had a garden with trees, and it was often my chore as a kid to rake the leaves together. Is the leaf blower an alternative to that?

Just asking because I want to understand how prevealent this form of polution is where you live.

Depends where you are in Europe. In France they’re commonly used by town employees to blow stuff off roads. I wish they’d just use brooms

Leaf blowers are much more efficient though. They're not just using them because they're loud and polluting, they're using them despite those attributes, because they easily quadruple a person's effectiveness with regards to moving large amounts of leaves on a flat surface.

If you’re on gravel or sand I agree, leaf blowers are way better. But honestly on Asphalt they seem less effective than a big wide broom.

Yes and leaf blowers were not a common sight in America until the late 80s. How did we get through life before then?

Less efficiently. You can get by without leaf blowers, you just need more people and it takes longer. You can get by without computers, you just need more people and it takes longer. You can get by without machines, you just need more people and it takes longer.

We tend to favor things that are more efficient, and it's hard to go back, because the citizenry won't be happy if you tell them your plans of quadrupling the work force and raising taxes accordingly.

Less machines, less maintenance, less pollution, less taxes.

I'd be OK with just leaving the leaves on the ground, to be honest.

They start to decompose and get slippery pretty quickly. It’s a safety concern.

Yes, it blows leaves. It's also quite obnoxiously loud, so there's noise pollution as well.

> I’m from europe and i have no idea what a leaf blower is

They love the stuff in Ireland. I have no idea why people use it. It doesn't do much better of a job than a rake would. It's completely stupid

> It doesn't do much better of a job than a rake would

That's disingenuous. Raking the yard is a half-day chore for me, that's fairly physically strenuous. Using a leafblower takes like an hour and is really easy- you can stand and point. A leafblower is a non-zero QoL improvement if you have to deal with leaves

Real question: why rake the yard? The road I understand, but what's wrong with just letting the leaves decompose and enrich the soil?

Leaves kill the grass. You want the grass to get light through the fall.

Just mow the leaves once or twice. Grass gets the light, and the leaves get decomposed more easily.

ok? how is that an environmentally better option than using a leaf blower?

It sounds like you have a massive yard. I can’t imagine having to spend more than 20mins raking a standard garden.

If you have a large property with tons of trees it is WAY more efficient than a rake

Is this a new thing? I’m Irish and never seen a leaf blower in my life (other than one used by a professional groundskeeper).

A leaf blower is how you move in the air when flying hooked up to a bunch of balloons:

https://readingasawriterhome.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/rus...

I've lived in a few different places, and mostly really only encountered leaf blowers either for some larger scale work like cleaning up leaves on a university campus, or for cleaning debris from parking lots.

I've recently moved to an area with single family or attached homes on small lots, and inexplicably, everyone has a leaf blower. Most houses have a driveway and parking area, and about 10 square feet of lawn, but for some reason all the guys are out blowing leaves around... I'm supposing there must be pockets where culturally that's what people do, I certainly don't get it

I’m also ”from Europe”, and I’ve seen leaf blowers used by both private individuals and local government for the last 15 years at least. Did I see it to the extent that it was ”_vastly_ worse than cars” in terms of pollution? No, not even close. But it’s been there.

>There might be better bang for the buck by starting with the more highly polluting things. Other than CO2, things like leaf blowers are _vastly_ worse than cars.

You also need to multiply that effect by how many cars are active versus how many leaf blowers are active. On a per-household basis, you might be racking up 1.5 car-hours per day:

    (2 commuters × 30 minute average commute × 2 commutes per day × (5 working days in each 7 day week) + some arbitrary amount to account for weekend/non-commuting trips

On the other hand, how often are you using a leaf blower? Maybe every time you cut the grass? Suppose you do it once a month and each time you blow for 30 minutes. That works out to 0.0167 hours per day, or 90 times less. And this is all assuming that everyone even bothers using a leaf blower. Maybe I live in a ghetto area, but I'd estimate that less than 1 in 10 houses uses a leafblower.

They need not be mutually exclusive - we can do both, and we should.

Pfft. Cars are way more polluting. For starters, they require removing huge amounts of land to pave over with roads.

This might be a hard sell. ICE lawn equipment might be slightly heavier, but it also performs much better in my experience.

Total run time and emitted particulate matters, do you actually have reason to believe the total output of lawn equipment is comparable to vehicle output?

From trustworthy wikipedia: "A 2011 study found that the amount of NMHC pollutants emitted by a leaf blower operated for 30 minutes is comparable to the amount emitted by a Ford F-150 pickup truck driving from Texas to Alaska. The two-stroke engines used in most leaf blowers operate by mixing gasoline with oil, and a third of this mixture is not burned, but is emitted as an aerosol exhaust. These pollutants have been linked to cancer, heart disease, and asthma," cited with https://www.edmunds.com/car-reviews/features/emissions-test-... and https://www.wsj.com/articles/leaf-blowers-are-loud-ugly-and-...

Ah, you're right. I remember seeing these ages ago, I wonder how I forgot. There's 4-stroke lawnmowers though, how bad are they?

I've had an electric lawn mower for about 10 years now and I can tell you that it has reduced my maintenance costs. For the ICE mower, I had to take it in every spring or every other spring to get it tuned up so it would start (from memory those bills were ~$75 each tune up).

Same with the ICE snowblower that I bought back when I was young and dumb seeing all my neighbors with one, so I bought one - what a maintenance nightmare. I use snow shovels now which are way better for the environment and my health.

My neighbor has one, but I think he often uses more time working on it than with it. I've considered one, but honestly, it's just my driveway and I'm (still) relatively young so I can shovel for now.

> ICE lawn equipment

If you are going to ban one thing, why not just ban lawns ;-p

Although to support your point, “Quantification of the environmental and economic benefits of the electrification of lawn mowers on the US residential market”[1] abstract says “Gasoline-powered lawn mowers and garden equipment [in the USA are] accounting for a quarter of all non-road gasoline emissions.”.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11367-021-01917-x

I inherited a large lawn mower which I use for the overgrown uneven driveway. I could replace the mower with a weed whacker, however that would then take many hours longer (for a chore I really hate doing and do as little as possible!) I hate the noise but it works. An equivalent electric mower would be completely unaffordable for me.

I thought the majority of PM2.5 emissions was due to two-stroke engines?

The only two-stroke device I own is a chainsaw. I wanted to get a battery powered chainsaw, but they are at least 3 times the price. I also own a mains powered electric chainsaw, but an extension cord is frustrating, and only reasonable to use within tens of metres from a house.

A good old scythe is much faster than a weed whacker for larger areas. Once you get the hang of it, it's not much slower than a lawn mower. It's good excersize too.

Interesting. I think my parents have one I could use - I will try to remember to give it a go. However I don’t have a flat lawn: instead I have verges/edges with stones, holes, and fences, so maybe less useful for my case.

I assume you'd cut around the fences. Once you get the hang of it, a scythe is quite precise.

Stones can be difficult if they're tall enough and everywhere. Otherwise you'd just make sure to keep the blade higher than the stones.

Completely agree. It's not even close! The scythe (when used by an experienced mower) can knock out twice the area as a weed wacker can in the same amount of time, without the noise, smell, most of the maintenance hassle, and it runs on breakfast or lunch.

In my leafy European country it was extremely rare to see them, and if one did, it was electric.

I just realized is it possible that Germany or at least Berlin has restrictions wrt. leaf blowers?

I basically never see them used on private property, only by the BSR (~berlin cleansing department) and even then it's not something I see often??

Time to google.

Turns out they are so loud that:

- You are not allowed to use them on Sunday or holidays.

- On other days only between 9:00-13:00 and 15:00-17:00, with exceptions for official street cleaning, industrial only areas etc. (Which I guess explain why I normally not seeing them and if then when used by the BSR ;=) )

Yup, they are absolutely atrocious. They also have lots of low-frequency noise that travels really far, and it hard to sound-proof against. I used to live in an apartment that was about 200 feet from a shopping center, and I could hear/feel the leaf blowers that were used instead of sweeping the storefront. And because they had a non-residential zoning, they could use the leaf blowers at 2 AM.

How long do you run your leaf blower for a year? In the UK, I don't know a single person with a gas powered leaf blower.

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