Can you believe it? Leaf blowers generate more pollution in a few hours than a pick up truck on a long trip!
Today, April 18th 2025, is sunny, warm and mild, so far, one of the nicest days of spring. But any attempt at enjoying the sun and balmy breezes were shattered by my neighbor’s roaring, leaf blower. This is “spring clean up” time, and pesky remnant leaves from fall must be blown off grassy lawns struggling for sunlight. The same noisy leaf blowers irritate the ears in fall. In winter my neighbor unleashes his overpowered just as noisy snow blower on his neighbors. Today, the decibel levels set off the alarm on my Apple Watch. I had to retreat to the semi quiet of the stuffy interior.
As a young boy, a resident of New Utrecht, of one of the six original Dutch colonial villages in Brooklyn NY, there were no leaf blowers to rattle the windows and jangle the nervous systems of the elderly. Of course, we had no trees or remnant forests to produce leaves. Only one tree graced, old Main Street of New Utrecht. It was a magnificent, century old, scaly-barked Sycamore (Plantanus occidentalis) or Plane Tree. It was known locally as “Ma Perkin’s Tree”, but no one in the neighborhood remembered who old “Ma” Perkins was..but that was “her”tree. Since this area of New Utrecht had once been farm fields where wheat oats and rye grains were grown, one had to assume this old tree must have once shaded the Perkin’s farm house.
In my youth the tree stood crowded-in on all sides by two-story, attached, 1920s-era, working-class homes. Its huge crown towered over the neighboring houses and its massive roots tipped up near-by concrete sidewalk slabs into a foot tangling obstacle course. Its low horizontal branches encouraged young tree climbers (me and my friends) up into sun dappled greenery far above the asphalt. Below, its cool shade made a fine place for the older residents to set up a folding chair on hot summer days. But being a deciduous tree, its leaves served only part of the year, and dropped off as cold weather approached. In fall it let down almost all at once it dry, brown-crinkly leaves, as if to reaffirm the primacy of nature to all those living in an alien concrete urban world. The fall of leaves marked the season that summer’s heat was gone, and that Ma Perkin’s tree no longer needed (or could afford) leaves when cold weather was on the way.
By early October brown leaves carpeted the concrete walks and “stoops” all around the old tree’s swollen, gnarly trunk. Brisk fall winds drove the leaves into unkempt piles against curbs, sidewalks, and brick garden walls. From there, homeowners quietly raked them up into curb-side, knee-high, dry-brown, crinkly dry piles, kids loved to kick apart.
Old Dutch traditions prized neat and well swept side walks. But neat leaf piles can’t stay in place where kid’s games and unpredictable winds hold sway. The traditional Dutch solution was to quickly and simply burn the piles to gray white ash. Elderly rakers stood guard, long rake in hand like Prometheus over his gifted smokey fire, pushing errant leaves into the leaping flame. The fragrant gray smoke rose up in the cool air to drift off to the southwest over Gravesend Bay a mile away. These “fall fires” burned on every tree-lined street, all part of the ancient rites of fall.
But by the 1960s, State and City Fathers soon put an end to these atavistic activities. Fearing conflagrations and polluted the air open fires were outlawed in old New Utrecht. New City rules required leaf piles to remain in place (but they didn’t obey) to be eventually swept up by roaring Department of Sanitation vacuum trucks. Kids and old folks missed the silent, calming fires, and the fragrant fall leaf smoke too.
(Did I leave out the fact that the fires served another purpose too. Some of us would roast a spud, (lifted from the wicker potato basket at the corner grocery store) by burying it down in the ashes of Mr Nelson’s smoldering leaf fire to roast into a “mickey” (a reference to the Irish? I did it once. But took my potato from home.) Also we had no aluminum foil—so the potato went into the hot ashes bare of protection. (Aluminum foil though available, came into common household use much later..It was so rare than many folks actually saved aluminum foil coming off gum and food wrappers by rolling it into a ball to keep for some later use.)
After a game of stick ball, we returned to retrieve our “mickeys”. Using the tip end of a stickball bat we rolled the blackened, smoking-hot “mickeys” out of still-hot embers. Tommy Macrone, the only “Mick” we had in the gang, juggled the hot potato in his hands, then broke it open to expose the steaming, creamy-white interior. It tasted of burnt potato skin, smoke and ash, but every one swore how great it was to eat a hot mickey sitting on the sidewalk curb in approaching dark under Ma Perkin’s tree.
There were no leaf blowers in those days..the standard metal-spring rake was all we had. And as well, in winter, the common coal shovel came out from the basement repurposed, but with a coat of slippery candle wax, to shovel snow. (No noisy snow blowers either!) Today raking leaves and shoveling snow are almost as unknown “skills” as writing in script, driving a stick shift car, or using a “skate key” to tighten metal roller skates to your leather shoes.
Today we are imposed on by the neighbor with his noisy leaf blower.
As I sat there listening to the growl of my neighbor’s abominable machine, and wondered was this noisy newcomer to the fall (and spring) seasons such an advantage?
Ma Perkin’s tree grew a several hundred thousand lovely five lobed, light green leaves with fuzzy undersurfaces. They grew in the summer sunlight formed by drawing CO2 gas out of the surrounding air and combining it with water drawn up by roots from under those slabs of sidewalk concrete. When in fall the leaves died and fell to ground, (and were burned by Mr Nelson, my neighbor) the CO2 and water that comprised those leaves flowed right back into the air.
Burning leaves is a simple “put and take proposition” leaves take carbon out of air and fires put the same carbon back into the air. In burning leaves we add no additional carbon derived from fossil fuel to the air to cause a build up of carbon dioxide to exacerbate global warming. OK, there were a few tiny bits of carbon ash which drift up into the murky N.Y City sky, but those motes of dust do not reside long in air and soon sink or get incorporated into cloud and rain drops to fall back to earth.
One could reasonably conclude that mechanical leaf-blowing may not be such a big advantage over simply following ancient traditions and burning those dry brown leaves—and roasting a few mickeys. They provided our elders with a pleasant fall season objective—rake up those leaves— and kids gained so much as well. I conclude that—ignoring possible threats of conflagration—burning a few leaves each fall might be just as good a clean up solution. Certainly better than noisy leaf blowers.
Leaf blowers became popular in the late 1980s. By 1989 manufactures of leaf blowers sold a million of these abominable noise makers. Today leaf blower manufacturers constitute a $35 billion dollar a year industry, (2023 data) which is expected to swell to more than $50 billion by 2029. Assuming a life span of ten years for the abominable machines, over the approximate 36 year history of this industry from 1989 to the present period, there may be more than 20 million of these noisy machines in operation. About 41 million Canadians are claimed to have about 2.5 million in use in that nation.
Most leaf blowers are powered by a 2-cycle (2-stroke) engine which uses gasoline laced with thick motor oil to lubricate its cylinders. Thus, besides the noise, they produce a great volume of air pollution as well. Four cycle gasoline (petrol, essence) models are little better.
*About a decade ago a professional study by Edmonds Insideline.com of air-pollution generated by leaf blowers reported that 2 cycle leaf blowers generated more pollutants than a 2011 Ford 150 SVT Raptor pickup truck! The investigators analysed for pollutants such as: nitric oxide, nitrous oxide, carbon monoxide —NO, NO3 and CO —as well as organic droplet particulates. The authors at Edmonds concluded that one had to drive the Ford 150 pickup more than 3,000 miles to produce the same amount of pollution generated by a 2 cycle leaf blower operating for a half hour of yard work!
It’s noteworthy that the unburned fuel in leaf blower emissions are the main source of smog the infamous California particulate pollution that made breathing air in California valleys a threat to life.
Thus approximately 20 million leaf blowers operating for many noisy hours per day across our land are not only making life less pleasant with their ear splitting noise, but are also producing massive amounts of lung searing air pollutants.
Perhaps, it’s time to go back to the good old spring rake, and that small fragrant fall curbside fire of dry leaves, with wisps of gray smoke-trails rising through a blue sky in Godly silence.
Sometimes there is no better way than the old tried and true way.
*See edmonds.com “Leaf blower emissions dirtier than high performance pick-up truck’s says Edmonds’Insideline.com”
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