It's High Time To Get Conventional Lawn Care Equipment Off Our Lawns

Conventional lawn care machines produce several harms, from noise to pollution to threatened biodiversity. Replacing them with electric machines is long overdue.

Story by

Danny Schleien

It’s early on a Saturday morning. You’re trying to get a good night’s sleep to recover from a long week. Suddenly, a noise startles you much earlier than you wanted to wake up. Dazed and confused, you look outside and instantly recognize the sharp sound of a leaf blower emanating from a neighbor’s property. There goes your good night’s rest as your neighbor wakes up the neighborhood, emits toxic fumes into the air, and threatens the biodiversity of their property as well.

Lawns and leaves often evoke peaceful and idyllic imagery. Plants are indelible to life on Earth, and as humans have collectively urbanized, they’ve sought to recreate the beauty of the natural world in suburban and urban environments. By any reasonable measure, however, they’ve done a terrible job at that. These days, wherever there are lawns and leaves, there are also loud noises and noxious fumes. No devices reflect that sad reality more than the machines used to maintain lawns.

Conventional lawn care machines produce several harms. But as the world becomes increasingly electrified, the electric revolution is making its way into the landscaping as well. It turns out you don’t need to use those lawn mowers and leaf blowers as often as you might think.

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The Noise

The most apparent harm produced by lawn care is the noise. It’s unmistakable. It feels like the sound of a running lawn mower or leaf blower pierces through your skull like little else. The deafening sound is akin to a biblical plague of locusts. But locusts are natural. Lawn care machines are not.

Research has validated that intuitive feeling. Those machines make a sound whose characteristics are particularly bad for us. Some gas-powered leaf blowers emit between 80 and 85 decibels (dB) while in use. But most cheap or mid-range leaf blowers can expose users to up to 112 decibels. For context, a plane taking off generates 105 decibels. It’s not just the intensity of the sound that’s bothersome. Compared to high-frequency sounds like a mosquito buzz or a dental drill, the low-frequency sound these machines emit fades slowly over long distances or obstacles (like walls and vegetation). A 2017 study found that even at 800 meters away (about half a mile), a conventional leaf blower sound exceeds the 55 dB limit considered safe by the World Health Organization. And they’re terrible for the people operating the machines. Sometimes, it’s a property resident doing yard work here and there. More often than not, it’s a poorly paid worker who’s simply looking to put food on the table and goes from property to property mowing lawns and blowing leaves. That worker has to listen to that noise at close range for hours on end, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.

Hearing loss from leaf blowers (or loud concerts) occurs cumulatively because of the ear’s anatomy. The tiny hairs in your ears (called stereocilia) that register sound are damaged whenever they are exposed to extreme noises, and they cannot recover. It’s just like a boxer or footballer sustaining repeated blows to their brains.

Given the dynamics at play in the lawn care industry, this is an environmental injustice issue. The people most at risk of noise pollution from dirty lawn mowers and leaf blowers are typically low-wage immigrants with insufficient health care and often without the power or privilege to escape the cacophony of these machines. That noise causes plenty of mental and physical health issues. Beyond disturbing your precious sleep, it can contribute to tinnitus and hypertension. One doctor who specializes in hearing issues was quoted in an Atlantic piece with a harrowing observation about landscaping crews, “Each time I see these crews, I think to myself: ‘10 years from now, they’ll be on the path to premature deafness.’ ”

The Fumes

To understand just how toxic conventional lawn mowers and leaf blowers are, look at the data. A 2011 study by Edmunds found that a two-stroke gasoline-powered leaf blower emits more pollution than a 6,200-pound Ford F-150 SVT Raptor pickup truck. Let me emphasize that: doing a half hour of yard work with a typical gas-powered leaf blower, which weighs about as much as a Chihuahua, releases just as much hydrocarbon as driving a giant pickup truck, which weighs about as much as a female Asian elephant, from Texas to Alaska. Imagine a Chihuahua requiring as much energy to run for a half hour as an elephant needs to run for over two days. This is beyond insane.

Compared to the big pickup truck, the leaf blower generates 23 times the carbon monoxide and almost 300 times more non-methane hydrocarbons. Two-stroke engines, whether they power leaf blowers or other devices, are downright terrible. A 2014 study published in Nature Communications found that emissions of volatile organic compounds (a variety of carbon gasses that can produce smog and harm humans) were on average 124 times higher from an idling two-stroke scooter than from a truck or a car. Each cubic meter of exhaust from an idling two-stroke scooter contained 60,000 times the safe level of exposure to benzene, a highly carcinogenic pollutant.

Why are these machines so damaging? Ultimately, it’s the downside of their high power-to-weight ratio. Unlike larger, heavier engines, a two-stroke engine (which is what typical leaf blowers use) combines oil and gas in one chamber. This gives the machine more power while remaining light enough for a human to carry. The problem is that this combination makes the machine both very loud and highly polluting. As much as a third of the fuel used by a gas-powered leaf blower is spewed into the air as unburned aerosol.

Doing a half hour of yard work with a typical gas-powered leaf blower, which weighs about as much as a Chihuahua, releases just as much hydrocarbon as driving a giant pickup truck, which weighs about as much as a female Asian elephant, from Texas to Alaska.

In sum, lawn care equipment creates more pollution in California than cars do–yes, you read that right. In the corner of the world that is perhaps most closely associated with car culture and most infamous for traffic, lawn care equipment is more polluting than all of the state’s cars combined. It’s hard to fathom just how inefficient these machines are. So let’s refer to how James Fallows, a world-renowned journalist, described them in a 2021 newsletter piece. “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.”

Not only do they emit harmful gasses like carbon monoxide, nitrous oxides, and hydrocarbons, leaf blowers often blast air at up to 200 miles per hour, which stirs up lots of dust. “That dust can contain pollen, mold, animal feces, heavy metals and chemicals from herbicides and pesticides,” notes Sara Peach of Yale Climate Connections. The result? Increased risk of lung cancer, asthma, cardiovascular disease, premature birth and other life-threatening conditions. The EPA estimates landscaping equipment contributes 13 to 21% of all toxic air emissions in the U.S. each year. Two-stroke engines have been phased out of nearly every single industry other than lawn care. It’s time to get them off our lawns.

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The Solution

It’s clear that these loud agents of neighborhood destruction aren’t your best friends. But we can’t just get rid of them, can we? Lawns and landscapes would look like an unkempt mess, right? To borrow from President Obama–yes we can! There are multiple paths you can take to rid yourself of conventional lawn care equipment.

First, the easiest is to replace dirty lawn care machines with their new and improved electric counterparts. Their market share is also growing rapidly; electric equipment grew from 32% to 44% of the overall American lawn equipment market from 2015 to 2020. There is a bevy of effective and affordable options on the market. This trend is both a cause and an effect of government action. Many jurisdictions are already banning gas-powered lawn mowers and leaf blowers. Last year, California passed a law to ban gas-powered lawn mowers and leaf blowers by July 2024, and more than 100 cities and towns across America (including D.C.) have already outlawed them as of April 2022.

Circling back to the noise pollution produced by conventional leaf blowers, one study cited by James Fallows in his aforementioned writing on leaf blower bans found that “in a densely settled neighborhood, a gas-powered blower rated at, say, 75 decibels of noisiness can affect up to 15 times as many households as a battery-powered blower with the same 75-decibel rating.” For context, one popular commercial electric leaf blower from Stihl is about as loud as an electric toothbrush. This movement has a lot going for it, with the interests of disaffected workers and everyday citizens on its side, as well as the unstoppable global movement away from fossil fuels.

Rakes are cheap, burn no fuel, provide good aerobic exercise, and are soothingly quiet. They’re also far less disruptive to the little creatures that live on the ground or under it than lawn care machines, electric or otherwise.

Second, there are some behavioral fixes you can make to your lawn care routine. One is to maintain your lawn less frequently. If you currently have a weekly routine, for example, consider going biweekly. Another is to get to work in low daylight hours. Lawn care machines produce chemicals that can help form ozone in the presence of sunlight. By operating these machines at darker hours, you might lessen their polluting effect.

The next step is to remove machines from your lawn care altogether, like using a rake for your leaves. Rakes are cheap, burn no fuel, provide good aerobic exercise, and are soothingly quiet. They’re also far less disruptive to the little creatures that live on the ground or under it than lawn care machines, electric or otherwise. If you live with family or roommates, you can even make lawn care an informal group activity that gives everyone a good workout while improving your property’s aesthetics.

Third, if you’re either lazy or don’t feel the need to attack your lawn with a machine or a rake, you can leave your lawn alone! A lazy approach to lawn care is often the best one. When left to its own devices, nature does a great job of maintaining itself. For example, leaves are good for biodiversity in multiple respects. Leaf litter–which is dislodged by any lawn care machine, whether gas-powered or electric–provides habitat for many creatures, from birds and bees to moths and frogs. With a few simple tips and tricks, you can manage your lawn responsibly.

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Continued

You can rake leaves to provide mulch for shrubs and perennials. Mulched leaves act as fertilizer for plants while providing habitat for salamanders, snails, and toads. You can scatter them in wooded areas. Or you can use leaves for composting–either piled up in a wire circle for passive composting or layered on top of each other for active composting. And especially in wintertime, leave some leaves behind for overwintering insects who could use a warm, comfortable home for the coldest months of the year. Wait until spring to cut back perennials so those insects can spend the winter there and birds can feed on the seeds.

This approach to lawn care is better for your pocketbook, your air, and your property. Rakes are much cheaper than lawn care equipment while leaving your leaves is free. You’ll avoid the toxic fumes produced by lawnmowers and leaf blowers, and the various creatures who live on your property will enjoy an undisturbed environment with healthier soil, better water retention capacity, and more habitat to thrive.

Fourth, another way to lessen your need for lawn care is to adapt your landscape to where you live, especially if you live in a drier climate. If you live in a desert, your lawn should not resemble the set of Jurassic Park. Perhaps the most common sense approach to adapting your landscape to where you live is xeriscaping. It is the process of designing landscapes to reduce or eliminate the need for supplemental irrigation.

Xeriscapes can reduce water consumption by 60% or more compared to regular lawn landscapes. Implementing native vegetation creates a habitat for insects and wildlife found in the area. Xeriscaping lowers pollution in two dimensions–both the toxic fumes generated by lawn care machines and the maintenance waste (such as lawn clippings and fertilizers) that contribute to urban runoff pollution. Furthermore, a study in Phoenix, AZ found that dry areas that utilized xeriscaping with shade trees mitigate urban heat island effects to the tune of an average temperature difference of roughly 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit.

Fifth, and last but certainly not least, you can amplify your impact by advocating for better, safer lawn care management. Talk to your neighbors and push for neighborhood-wide leaf blowing intervals or limit lawn care to one day a week. A homeowners association, if you’re part of one, might be a good place to start. If you hire a landscaping company, push them to adopt electric mowers and blowers. This requires an initial investment but going electric will almost certainly save money in the long run while safeguarding the health of workers and nearby residents as well as local plants and wildlife.

If you feel so inclined, talk to your local government to push for restrictions on gas-powered lawn care. No one can accelerate the ongoing transition away from gas-powered lawn care better than governments.

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Conclusion

It’s obvious that conventional lawn care equipment isn’t super popular. Nobody likes the noise disturbance they produce nor do they enjoy ingesting their dangerous fumes. The birds and bees who live on your property don’t like these machines either. Luckily, innovation has produced wonderful electric lawn care machines that reduce or eradicate many of the harms of gas-powered machines. But the best approach to lawn care is usually machine-free. As with many aspects of day-to-day life, unless you really need to intervene, you’re probably better off leaving nature to its own devices.

Key Takeaways

Lawn care equipment creates more pollution in California than cars do.

More than 100 cities and towns across America (including D.C.) have already outlawed gas-powered lawn care equipment as of April 2022.

Electric equipment grew from 32% to 44% of the overall American lawn equipment market from 2015 to 2020.

Moving to electric lawn care equipment requires an initial investment but going electric will almost certainly save money in the long run while safeguarding the health of workers and nearby residents as well as local plants and wildlife.

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It's High Time To Get Conventional Lawn Care Equipment Off Our Lawns

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