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It’s been pouring rain all day and still is raining, though not quite so hard – but all the same there’s someone with a snarling backpack blower out there, the one who generally takes an hour or more to shift every leaf on the large property across the alley. I hate the sound noise of blowers even more than I hate the noise of mowers, weedeaters, hedgeclippers, edgers, and all the rest of the box of tricks.
I’m not the only one who hates the damn things.
It’s almost impossible to enjoy a quiet moment in many of Philadelphia’s neighborhoods without hearing leaf blowers. The engines alternate between bone-shaking rumbles and high-pitched whines that assault our ears.
It’s a snarl rather than a whine – at any rate it’s a peculiarly grating, distracting, irritating, blood pressure-raising noise. All for the sake of moving every last blade of grass and speck of dust, as if that were important, or worth doing at all.
But these machines are far worse than an annoyance. Gas-powered leaf blowers are dangerous to our neighbors, the workers who use them, and the planet. City Council and the Mayor’s Office must ban them.
Other cities and states have already recognized and addressed this problem. Starting in 2024, California will ban the sale of new gas leaf blowers as an effort to stem their negative impact on the environment and human health. The volunteer-led nonprofit organization Quiet Clean D.C. led a successful campaign to ban gas leaf blowers in Washington, which took effect on Jan. 1. Seattle’s City Council voted to phase out gas-powered blowers for city departments and contractors by 2025, and for businesses and residents by 2027.
2027. Groan. Four more years.
The danger of gas leaf blowers has been well documented. According to James Fallows, a former writer for the Atlantic who was born in Philadelphia, gas leaf blowers are “vastly the dirtiest and most polluting kind of machinery still in legal use.” He adds that the engine is powered by “a slosh of oil and gas that spews up to one-third of its fuels as unburned aerosols into the environment.”
All to create a blast of air to move leaves around. It’s too stupid.
The sound of leaf rakes …
I like that sound.
So do I.
The blower was snarling for more than two hours. I nearabout lost my mind.
1. Rake leaves into one or more pyramidal piles. 2. Create a few depressions in the surface of each pile. 3. Fill each depression with a shovelful of soil/compost. 4. Wait till Spring, and plant a tomato plant or other favourite veggie in each filled depression, 5. Harvest. 6. Come Autumn, add more leaves to each pile, which by now will be alive also with earthworms and attractive to birds. 7. Go to 1.
Got a neighbour, 3 doors down, opposite side of the road who uses one to blow the trash from the front of his house. Doesn’t remove anything, just moves it. Then, my neighbour 2 doors down from me repeats the process, moving the crap closer to me.
Me? I use a broom, or the hose after I’ve washed my car.
i would probably rake, broom, or even blow the trash back to the kind neighbors?
seriously, I think this is a symptom of the same problem that creates the need for massive pickup trucks and large, loud riding mowers. This is a family blog so I wont provide my diagnosis
This ain’t no family blog.
People aren’t willing to pay the money using rakes would require… Most of the blowers you hear? Landscape maintenance contracts and they’re bloody heavy. My wife could barely lug the thing around when she was servicing clients’ houses because they’re not really made for women to use.
For clearing suburban and urban lawns? Damned stupid.
They do have their place, though… e.g. clearing otherwise well-drained, sand-based (horseback riding, in my case, but presumably other sports as well) arenas run by individual owners/instructors with a shortage of time and/or physical prowess. Leaving organic matter to decay on such substrates will damage the footing, and while having packs of young, able-bodied packs of working students can help that’s not always an option.
I feel like this is another of those useful inventions that’s near-necessary for some, but had been co-opted by the lazy :-/
I could almost understand the things if they were leaf suckers, and were connected to a sack to collect the detritus. But what does blowing achieve besides massive amounts of unnecessary pollution? Isn’t the wind blowing the leaves around just as efficiently?
It’s far healthier for the lawns to mulch the leaves, especially in the fall, because in the spring as the snow melts the detritus is decomposed and gets into the soil. To me it makes no sense to remove a source of natural fertilizer, and then in the spring put fertilizer from a bag on the grass. Also, speaking of grass it’s rarely native to where it’s growing. I’m in the process of turning over my lawn to red clover, which has a flowering stage in the spring so all those pollinators can get a good start on the year.
But, if you must clear your lawn, raking does have the effect of dethatching the grass and prepping for overseeding. Blowing, not so much. It’s weird that we waste so many nutrients.
Since our neighbor retired, leaf-blowing has become his hobby.
He lives in the woods and has an asphalt driveway. All afternoon long, even on windy days, he blows & blows.
I’m going to lose my shit over this.
Oh goddddddddddd, what a nightmare.
BK @ 7 – they are heavy but not too heavy for women to use, generally speaking. I had to use them when I worked for the Parks Department, and once the thing was on my back the weight wasn’t a problem.
Because my husband can barely rake anymore (and won’t admit it), and I can’t rake because of shoulder surgeries, I got him a lawn sweeper. It is not gas or electric; all he has to do is gather the leaves in that, then can pile them wherever we want to create compost.
But since it’s not gas or electric powered, the macho men don’t want one.
I don’t think they are such a thing in the UK – at least I’ve never heard one, though my repose in my wee garden is often disturbed by lawn mowers and chain saws. The trend in gardening now is to be much less tidy and manicured, leaving the leaves alone as helpful to wildlife and as organic matter. The most you’d do is rake up the leaves and add them to the compost heap, or use them as mulch – at least the garden group I belong to recommend this.
The only place where rotting leaves should be pushed aside is on tarmacked paths for walking/cycling – they turn into a slippery, dangerous mush, also they will pile up over depressions or obstacles, hiding them and causing accidents.
I’ve seen a few people use leaf blowers to remove snow from driveways. The circumstances were 1-2 inches of powder. It looked like a significant amount of the snow was getting suspended in the air rather than moving in any particular direction. I think a broom would have worked better. Depending on the size and type, may have taken less time.
KBPlayer you are sooooooo lucky not to have them!
Agreed about the leaf-mush on street/pavement, but that can just be shoveled up, in fact more easily and neatly than with a blower. If you get rid of them before they turn to mush a blower is faster but TOO BAD, just spend the more time it takes.
The Council has nifty little sweeping machines for clearing paths. Not enough of them of course, and not used as much as they should.
I once tried to sweep a stretch of cycle path near me with a hard broom, but the leaves were fixed like glue. They needed a hard scrape with a metal blade.
This I don’t understand. Our rakes, my push mower, and our shovels (for the rare occasions when it snows enough to shovel) are all powered by muscle and caffeine. As far as I’m concerned, that makes me more macho. (I’ve actually considered getting a scythe for the lawn, but I’d probably chop off a few toes. Maybe even mine.)
The people my wife and I hire to maintain the yard use a combination of blowers and rakes to collect the leaves into piles or move them where intended. Some of the leaves get mulched. Caring for the yard is not a job I am capable of doing, not am I interested in doing it, so I’m happy to pay someone else, and I don’t dictate what tools they use, beyond asking for mulching at least some of the leaves. Were I forced to do it myself, I’d probably buy an electric (battery) blower.
Well, why not? You say that as if it’s virtuous not to rule out blowers, but why?
There are good reasons not to use blowers: they are particularly polluting, as the quoted article points out. Raking and/or sweeping would take the people your wife and you hire a little longer, so they might boost their price to compensate, that’s all.
I’m pretty sure my employers up in the big house have asked their gardeners to sweep or rake where possible, because the gardeners have been doing that, when before they didn’t. I know the male employer hates blowers, because we had a little chat about it once.
KB Player, some areas in the US will fine you if you don’t keep your yard up to standards. Where we used to live, in Oklahoma, our ordinary working to middle class community was surrounded by rich assholes, and the grass couldn’t look like it was grass; it had to look like carpet. Getting rid of leaves was required.
Where I lived before I got married, in a working class to middle class community in Oklahoma City, I never raked other than to get neatness occasionally in where my decaying leaves lay – get them where I wanted. No one gave a damn. But when I moved to Edmond, it quickly became obvious that they had someone out checking every day. I have a picture in my imagination of some guy on his knees measuring every blade of grass.
As for non-fossil fuel powered machines, you’ll be healthier pushing them around and getting an actual work out, not just a stroll in the park.
It was not my intention to imply anything of the sort. I’m not trying to claim virtue. It is not the case that everything I do is right and just and virtuous. Some things, I simply don’t care enough to change my behavior. This is one of them.
In this case, in this area, the idea of asking one gardener to do things differently for one client, at a cost for me but of close to zero benefit to the environment, seems worthless. So I can feel better about my environmental impact? So I can possibly lose a gardener and have to find someone else who’s reliable? Maybe I can find someone in this area I can afford who is willing to abide by this request and is reliable, but I don’t feel a need to perform that experiment.
I agree there are many reasons not to use gas leaf blowers. That’s why I suggested I’d use an electric leaf blower if I had to do the work myself. There are fewer reasons not to use electrics. We don’t have many outdoor appliances, but the two or three we have are electric.
I didn’t respond to make some kind of virtuous stance, but because it seemed some people were unclear about why anyone used blowers in the first place, and were asking. So I described how things worked at my house. Sorry to have given an incorrect impression.
@iknlast – who has the power to fine you? That sounds very despotic.
I am sorry to say that paving and patios have taken over many gardens in the UK. The front garden, which used to be an overly-manicured showpiece, is now often paved to park a car, which is an abomination. A pretty front garden not only gives pleasure to passers-by, it’s also a social space – you stop and admire the roses, tell the gardener how splendid they are looking, and some people take surreptitious cuttings.
However gardening is still popular, as are gardening programmes, and the trend is for gardens to be friendly to wildlife, with small ponds, bug hotels, patches of nettles for butterflies, flowers for pollinators and the like. Also verges and roundabouts are often sown with wild flowers instead of strimmed to the inch, and an edge of flowering plants like cow parsley will be left by paths.
Sackbut – ah! Sorry for misunderstanding you.
As for why do it though, I disagree. One ugly noise eliminated is not worthless! I don’t know, maybe all your neighbors are happy with the noise, but then again maybe not. I was walking up my home block a while back and there was a blower in action and an approaching neighbor stopped to say how horrible they are so we had an enjoyable chat about how horrible they are. I think it may be that more people hate them than is obvious. Yes there’s also the pollution but the noise matters too.
But yes, battery/electric ones are another story.
As it has been remarked, humanity will never be free until the last leaf blower manufacturer is drowned in the blood of the last subwoofer manufacturer.
snerk
The noise is a mild annoyance to me, but it isn’t frequent. I live in a neighborhood of single-family houses, so noise from two houses down is pretty much abated. The main noise is from lawn mowers, which operate pretty close to year-round here. I don’t think there are as many leaves on the ground here as I might have expected back in New England, where I used to live, so that may also reduce the prevalence of leaf blower noise.
I have no idea who the neighbors are or what they think, so I couldn’t say.
Maybe they’re a bigger thing in Seattle. Maybe also some of the garden maintenance outfits just don’t know how to use them. When I worked for the Parks Dept the point was speed, and we knew not to use them when everything was wet. Here in the nabe wet is not seen as a reason to leave them behind, so the blowing goes on and on and on and on………
KB Player – the city has the power to fine you if they have a city ordinance. No more despotic, really, than requiring me to stop at stop signs. The only thing is, this particular ordinance has no good effects on anyone (other than the perception of not dropping property values by having a lawn that looks “natural”) while the stop at the stop sign one does prevent harm to others…and to me.
Some neighborhood associations have those regulations, but I imagine they don’t have a lot of regulatory power.
Well, but a law is a tad despotic if it has no good reason for existing, no? The reasons for laws about stopping at stop signs and red lights are quite clear; reasons for laws forcing people to have uniform lawns are much less clear.
@iknlast – it would be a despotic law which said you could only grow red, white and blue flowers. Uniform lawns make as much sense. As Ophelia says, there are laws which are reasonable, and laws that are not.
The Royal Horticultural.Society has revealed that between 2005 and 2015 3 million front gardens were paved over, mostly to park cars.This is terrible for overheating, flooding and biodiversity loss. If I could I would be despotic in my turn, and have large cadres of the muscular young dig these up and fill them with plants.
Also, there are appalling rumours that in the USA in some places you are not allowed to hang out your washing. That sounds crazy.
Yes as far as I know that’s quite true – in “gated communities” as they’re called. My employers have a place in one of those on the Monterey Peninsula, and I’m very confident there are all sorts of rules about what you can and can’t do. I’ve most certainly never seen any laundry outside there.
So the assumption is that everyone uses an electric dryer? That is so wasteful. Also your clothes smell much nicer when they’re dried outside. It’s a little fillip when in about March you can start drying your washing outside again and you bury your face in the sweet smelling sheets as you bring them in dry.
KBPlayer:
Oh how amusing it would be if I could post one of my photos from the 2018 cold snap right here with the caption “march” ;)
(I’ve also had slight sunburn in march. Shrug)
Re “the assumption is that everyone uses an electric dryer?”
Not at all; perish the thought, what a preposterous assumption that would be.
Some people use gas dryers.
KBPlayer, yep, that’s the assumption all right, just as it’s often the assumption that everyone has a car. It’s absurdly wasteful and very typical.