As a teenager, I awoke every Friday morning at 7am to the shattering sound of our next-door neighbor’s leaf blowers, robbing me of those last precious moments of sleep before school started. I’ve long despised these unnecessary machines for their 100-plus-decibel noise that can trigger migraines; more recently I learned about the horrific environmental toll.
In a 2021 story for Sierra magazine, I reported: “The two-stroke engine employed by leaf blowers combines gas and oil to give the machine more power. This makes it light enough to carry, but two-strokes spit out as much as a third of this fuel mix as unburned aerosol. Operating a commercial leaf blower for just one hour emits smog-forming pollution comparable to driving a new passenger car about 1,100 miles, roughly the distance from Los Angeles to Denver, more than 15 hours of driving. That fact comes from the California Air Resources Board.”
Electric blowers are an alternative to horribly polluting gas machines. Another alternative: a rake.
I followed that up with a 2022 story for which I interviewed James Fallows, who as a young man was the lead speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter and now writes frequently for The Atlantic. Fallows led the drive to ban gas leaf blowers in Washington DC, which went into effect at the beginning of 2022. He told me: “It’s been a dramatic change.” Since January, he says, he’s heard the roar of gas leaf blowers just a “handful” of times. “You can hear the silence. What had been an unnecessary and almost omnipresent intrusion in people’s lives is not there anymore.”
Click here to read the 2022 story with Fallows’ comments on Sierra’s site.
Click here to read my initial Sierra story on leaf blowers, which discusses the implications of California’s 2024 ban on the sale – but not the use – of gas leaf blowers.
