Gas Leaf Blowers... Blow

There are a pair of office buildings near ours. Each is fairly large—over ten stories tall—and surrounded by small yards, the commercial real estate equivalent of a moat. These yards are mostly grass, dotted with a few small trees and shrubs in mulched beds. Usually, they’re nothing remarkable.

This day, however, the corporate lawns were covered in leaves, and their respective landscaping companies—let’s call them Alpha and Omega—were on-site working on leaf removal. As you might expect, this involved small crews wielding gas-powered backpack leaf blowers.

From my office window, I watched as one of the Alpha crew blew the leaves off his assigned property—right over the border onto the yard of the neighboring building. The Omega crew, busy on another part of their grounds, eventually worked their way over and blew those same leaves right back onto Alpha’s side. By then, the Alpha crew had moved on to a different section, so they didn’t notice right away.

That is, until one of the Alpha guys came back around for a final pass. He found a comical amount of leaves back on his turf. Frustrated, he blew them right back over to Omega’s yard and began to walk away. But this time, an Omega crew member noticed. He started gesturing and yelling, though the Alpha guy didn’t hear him—or pretended not to. So, naturally, the Omega guy grabbed his blower and retaliated, sending the leaves flying back over to Alpha’s side.

Within seconds, the two men were in a full-blown leaf-blowing battle, aggressively blasting leaves back and forth. I legitimately expected they would throw hands, but what happened next was far more glorious: spontaneous collaboration.

Without exchanging a word—thanks to the noise of the blowers and their ear protection—the two workers shifted tactics. Instead of blowing leaves directly at each other, they began angling their blowers along the property line. Step by step, the entire pile of leaves inched along the border until it was deposited in the street.

With their respective areas clear, they kind of smiled and chuckled to each other, gave an upward nod of respect, and returned to their crews. A bit later both teams packed up and left.

By the time I left the office that evening, the wind had blown the leaves from the street back into both yards.

This story, on its own, is an amusing little anecdote. If they’d been using electric leaf blowers, the waste of time wouldn't have bothered me much. But they weren’t—they used gas-powered blowers. Which means the real story goes something like this:

• Millions of years ago, plants and animals died, degraded, and compressed into oil.

• We invented machinery to drill, frack, and extract that oil.

• We transported it via pipelines or tankers halfway across the world.

• Then we refined it into gasoline, which was pumped into trucks, driven to gas stations, and eventually loaded into leaf blowers.

• These modern marvels of engineering ignite that gasoline in a series of thousands of tiny explosions to generate the equivalent airflow of a continuous hard sneeze.

• And that sneeze was used to blow some leaves back and forth for a while, until...

• The leaves ended up almost exactly where they had been when they fell from the trees.

Even if that was the end of it, probably not a huge deal. But here is where I've buried the lede friends, because those two leaf blowers are environmental nightmares. According to a study by Edmunds, a single gas-powered blower used for just 30 minutes produces the same hydrocarbon emissions as driving a 2011 Ford F-150 Raptor 3,900 miles.1

"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."

Which means, in this little tale of two leaf-blowers, the math breaks down like this:

• 1/2 hour = 3,900 miles

• 1 hour = 7,800

• Each blower was used for about 2 hours, so that's 15,600

• There were two blowers running, which is the equivalent of 31,200 miles of driving

That’s like driving from New York to Los Angeles (~3,191 miles) almost ten times. And that doesn’t even account for the other blowers their crews were using at the same time.

That level of pollution isn't ok for 5 complete back and forth trips across the country, how the hell is it possibly ok for clearing leaves?! 

Not convinced? Here's a fun experiment (disclaimer for idiots: don’t actually try this): take your gas-powered leaf blower into your garage, close the doors, and turn it on. Then count how long it takes before you feel woozy. Spoiler: it won’t take long. 

Would it be ok if your garage was twice as large? Ten times? When exactly does it become "safe" to pump that poison into the air?

So what’s the takeaway? Beyond pointing out the absurdity of gas-powered blowers, here are two simple action steps:

1. If you need to use a leaf blower, just use an electric one. Modern electric models are surprisingly powerful and pollute far less.

2. Support efforts to ban gas-powered blowers.

Several places have already enacted bans, including Washington, D.C., Montgomery County (MD), Burlington (VT), Evanston (IL), Miami Beach (FL), Portland (OR), and numerous cities in California, which have also mandated zero-emission small engines.

Yes, the world has bigger problems. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tackle the small ones. Gas-powered blowers are an easy fix. Let’s do better.

¹ If you’re wondering how this is possible, two words: Catalytic Converter. Cars have ‘em, leaf blowers (and many other things) don’t.