Even Cambridge city contractors still need gas-powered leaf blowers for anywhere from 20 percent to 35 percent of the year, but the lawn equipment could see a phaseout passed soon. A proposed law that would see residential use ending in March 2025 and commercial use in March 2027 was passed to a second reading Monday by city councillors.
The hydrocarbon emissions from a half-hour of yardwork with a gas-powered leaf blower is about the same as driving a pickup truck from Texas to Alaska, councillor Patty Nolan has said.
First comes a chance for community feedback Nov. 27 – all of the city’s licensed landscapers were to have been invited as of Monday – that Nolan expects will inform part of an Ordinance Committee hearing the next day.
“We’ll position ourselves well to take up this very important and, I think, very exciting step,” Nolan said at a Sept 13 meeting of the council’s Health & Environment Committee, noting the issues leading officials to make repeated efforts at a ban: “The emissions have been quite startling in terms of their impact, but also the environmental injustice of having workers using these machines end up with permanent health damage to their lungs and ears.”
The city tried a ban of all leaf blowers as recently as 2019, but pushback from landscapers – including the city’s own Department of Public Works – portrayed it as unworkable. “The council recognized that a full ban on gas and electric leaf blowers was not really something that we could do here, for various reasons,” said the department’s John Nardone in September. There’s still a need for the blowers at various times on larger parcels such as parks and cemeteries, and the more powerful gas blowers are needed for short periods in the spring and fall when workers face the wettest, heaviest debris.
The city reduced allowed decibel levels on the equipment in 2007 and limited gas-powered uses in 2019 to certain hours and times of year, with the License Commission pursuing violators avidly for possible fines of up to $300 per disallowed use. “It has been sort of the practice of the board to always issue the maximum fine,” commission chair Nicole Murati Ferrer said in September. But a good outcome has been that now “many of these companies are doing their own training of their own employees” to avoid the fines.
Reasons to pause
The city began its switchover to electric devices in 2016 – not just blowers, but riding and push mowers, weed whackers and more, Nardone said. The electric version are more expensive upfront, but increasingly are able to keep up with gas-powered models in ways that could make a phaseout plausible. The models are susceptible to the same computer chip supply chain issues that recently caused a shortage of new models on car lots, and rapidly fading batteries remain a problem.
“We are lucky if we’re getting 20 to maybe 30 minutes out of one of these. We do carry extra batteries with us,” Nardone said. “We find that people find creative ways to keep batteries charged – and the last thing we want is an F-250 diesel pickup truck running all day long so they can charge an electric battery for a leaf blower.”
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There’s a state compensation program for homeowners who want to switch to electric gear, but no such fund for commercial landscapers trying to switch, city sustainability director Susanne Rasmussen told councillors. A bill is pending on Beacon Hill to create that program, but in the meantime one landscaper said in the hearing his company spent $100,000 in a year to buy electric equipment, then had to spend $10,000 more to add the infrastructure to power it.
Nardone warned against letting a Cambridge phaseout get ahead of advances in equipment power or landscapers’ ability to pay for it. Adding staff to accomplish the same amount of work was a bad option: “If contractors don’t have access to the right equipment and have to bring in more people, it’s going to be more expensive for people who use landscaping services. For us, I think we’ve made it clear that we could not keep up if we’re going to do an all-out ban,” he said. “There is a labor market shortage. We struggle to get people in at Public Works. In general, the labor industry is struggling just to get people in.”
New wind blowing
Gas-powered leaf blowers face an increasingly hostile landscape, though, and it’s not made of leaves – but of laws. Nolan pointed to bans and ordinances setting limits on the devices coming to Washington, D.C., the entire state of California, and Massachusetts cities and towns including Arlington, Belmont, Boston, Brookline, Lexington and Winchester. “Some of the cities have actually paid folks to buy extra batteries,” Nolan said.
With a decision likely to happen before the end of the current political term, there is at least one councillor who seems ready to vote in favor of a phaseout: Dennis Caroline.
“You know, when we did a plastic bag ban, we were told it was going to ruin the world,” Carlone said.
A stronger
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I have no personal dog in this fight, but I will note that the claim “hydrocarbon emissions from a half-hour of yardwork with a gas-powered leaf blower is about the same as driving a pickup truck from Texas to Alaska” dates back to a 2011 statement by one company and that industry standards on blower designs and regulations nationally for such have changed (the quote came out in federal standards regulations hearings) and that the type of emissions were also shown as different and involved different pollutants. Design changes, changes in filters etc were forced on the industry that makes such blowers in 2015 and presumably no one is running equipment made more than a decade ago.
What we are seeing is the continued push in Cambridge to make us “All electric in all things” when the power grid is not ready for it in this area or in the state to be adapted. And not paying attention to the vulnerability that turning everything over to electric power in every way without enough generation capacity.
Electric items need to be charged in the case of leaf blowers switched over. That power has to come from somewhere.
I don’t see the city putting solar grids on all the government buildings or convincing the Universities to do so to all their existing structures. Can we see some movement on that front? Adding 1 city building to the list of buildings that generate solar power a year is insufficient.
Note: The one building a year is based on:
https://www.cambridgema.gov/Departments/publicworks/Initiatives/Sustainability/renewableenergy
Lets get the city government moving on this so that the city itself is using less of the grid capacity locally.
And if the city wants to get rid of the gas powered leaf blowers, then the city itself should be using electric ones exclusively (they aren’t). Or paying for the extra manpower needed to deal with things manually. Or perhaps go to using electric leaf collectors to vacuum up the leaves?
The city says it is using all-electric devices; its contractors use mainly electric. That is my understanding from the Sept. 13 hearing. As Owen O’Riordan put it: “People who are employed by the Department of Public Works are using electric blowers exclusively or, I should say, better described as battery powered, exclusively. Our contractors are committed to using battery powered leave doors to the extent that they can.” Nardone: “We work with several different contractors to do landscape maintenance for us. One of our primary contractors that does about, I would say, 75 percent of our park maintenance has switched over to battery-operated backpack leaf blowers. And he and he told us they are committed to doing that.”
I’m confused about the use of the word “need.”
Like truly, my own sidewalk and path are FASTER to clear with a broom than with a leaf blower, especially when they are wet.
And a rake is marginally more effort on grass.
I’m glad the electric ones for the environment, but do wish they were a little quieter.
And yes, let’s update the grid and get more solar up and out there, please!
“If contractors don’t have access to the right equipment and have to bring in more people, it’s going to be more expensive for people who use landscaping services.”
So we can only pass laws to protect the environment if nobody has to pay anything as a result? That’s a pretty big restriction.
There’s no need to upgrade the grid for this. People say that reflexively when they hear about electrification but you have to look at numbers. A large leaf blower might be 10-20 amps. A single house or apartment unit will have an electrical panel with a capacity of 100 amps, and 200 amps is increasingly common. The capacity issue for leaf blowers is just that they’re used far from outlets, so they need big batteries.
The things that will require grid upgrades are the ones that use more electricity, like home heating/cooling, electric vehicles, and industrial uses.
That’s a good point that the 2011 study is out of date. Here is recent one saying that in 2020, leaf blowers emitted as much PM2.5 pollution as 234 million cars.
https://grist.org/technology/lawn-equipment-pollution-report/
A lot of the sources talking about leaf blower harms don’t distinguish well between types of pollution. For example, the CO2 impact is not that bad. But the PM2.5, VOCs, NOx, and similar pollutants are serious. My understanding is that these are hard to avoid in a 2-stroke engine like a leaf blower or lawn mower, and there’s no easy way to filter them.