Leaf Blowers: An Invisible Source of Climate Chaos and Harm to Human and Environmental Health

Prologue

One of the reasons I moved to Claremont, California, in 2008 was Claremont’s banning of the gasoline-powered leaf blowers. I detested them long before 2008. I still do. They are harmful and useless.

Leaf blowers are mostly powered by Earth-heating petroleum and gasoline to move leaves from trees on the ground from one spot to another. Why would anyone want to do that? So that the “gardener” or homeowner can trash those leaves.

Tree leaves: ecology, beauty and light

Imagine the ignorance that also powers this process. Deciduous trees let their leaves drop to the ground in winter. Lower winter temperatures stress trees and prepare them for spring renewal when the leaves reappear to support the life of the trees. And in a normal ecosystem without human intervention the fallen leaves would become food and protective cover for insects and other wildlife, small mammals and amphibians. Leaves would also become fertilizer, and eventually soil. But in the unhealthy environment of cities, humans have this crazy notion they know more and better than nature. What about the overwintering wildlife without the cover of leaves? How’s that biodiversity is supposed to survive without tree leaves? Have we thought enough about the harm we cause with our mania to make trash all this fantastic energy, beauty and light in the leaves of trees?

Inconvenient nature

Lawn-care swindlers employ a variety of toxic chemicals and machines, including leaf blowers, to control nature or to convince homeowners to make their yards look neat and clean.

However, no matter what stupid technologies humans use against nature, they cannot control it. Nature is almighty Earth. On the contrary, homeowners employing leaf blowers are for a big surprise: their machines control them.

The polluting leaf blowers emit Earth-heating gases (carbon dioxide, nitrous oxides, and methane), which undermine the present and the future. Leaf blowers are a badly designed and unregulated machines for the mere convenience of the lazy homeowner and for the profit of the manufacturers. Homeowners are trying to impress their neighbors with a yard of turf but leafless. Leaf blowers emit carbon monoxide, nitrous oxides and other greenhouse gases. “Pound for pound, gallon for gallon, hour-for-hour,” says the writer James Fallows, “the two-stroke gas powered engines in leaf blowers and similar equipment are vastly the dirtiest and most polluting kind of machinery still in legal use…. Using a two-stroke engine is like heating your house with an open pit fire in the living room — and chopping down your trees to keep it going and trying to whoosh away the fetid black smoke before your children are poisoned by it.” In California, leaf blowers and other lawn-care machines harm human and environmental health more than cars do.

America’s car love affair

Leaf blowers pollute, no doubt about that, but it’s unlikely they can compete with cars. The reporter Somini Sengupta explained the carbon footprint of cars in America this way. “[I]f American cars,” she said, “S.U.V.s and pickup trucks were their own country, they would be the sixth-largest emitter of heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions since 1949, putting them behind the total national carbon dioxide emissions produced by the United States, China, Russia, Germany and Japan.”

Blasting sounds and threats

Back to leaf blowers. In 2020, Monmouth University of New Jersey reached these conclusions about leaf blowers. These devices cause detrimental noise to human health. The decibel levels exceed 80, clearly harmful to our health. They also create low frequency noise that travels extensively and causes “increased stress levels.” Leaf blowers also leave a toxic footprint on its users and other humans: their emissions include “high levels of benzene, butadiene, formaldehyde and fine particulates, all of which are known carcinogens or known respiratory, cardiovascular and neurological health risks and which lead to increased levels of mortality in children and the elderly.”

The US EPA also confirms the toxic nature of the gasoline-powered lawn and garden machines (like leaf blowers): An EPA 2011 study says: “Extensive evidence exists on the adverse health effects of exhaust emissions and other fine particulates which include cardiovascular disease, stroke, respiratory disease, cancer, neurological… conditions, premature death, and effects on prenatal development.”

What homeowners hooked on leaf blowers forget is that their machines are nightmares the so-called lawn-care industry created for profit. Those monsters took over their desires from ceaseless advertisements and wrong ideas about the natural world. “[The monsters] come,” says the writer Margaret Renkl, “in a deafening, surging swarm, blasting from lawn to lawn and filling the air with the stench of gasoline and death. I would call them mechanical locusts, descending upon every patch of gold in the neighborhood the way the grasshoppers of old would arrive, in numbers so great they darkened the sky, to lay bare a cornfield in minutes. But that comparison is unfair to locusts. Grasshoppers belong here. Gasoline-powered leaf blowers are invaders, the most maddening of all the maddening, environment-destroying tools of the American lawn-care industry.”

Reactions

I would add that these invading mechanical locusts spoil my day the moment I see and hear their awful noise. I used to talk to some of the gardeners using them like weapons, telling them they should shut them down immediately or abandon them and return to rakes or battery-powered machines. But these gardeners, in Claremont, most of them Spanish speaking Mexicans or Latinos from Central America, did not understand me. I used to raise my voice, but that expression of unhappiness did not make any difference. Besides, they were doing the dirty work of homeowners hiding in their houses watching television. I even wrote to the Claremont City Council, which had already banned petroleum-powered leaf blowers since March 1, 1991, but failed to enforce its decision. My suggestion urged them to send a letter to all homeowners informing them that allowing their gardeners to use a banned machine would result in steep fines. However, the City Council ignored my request.

The abominable machines are still adding greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere, making climate chaos worse, while disrupting and polluting human and wildlife in Claremont – and beyond.

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