Leaf blowers were recently voted to Parade magazine’s list of products Americans wish they could un-invent.
Landscape contractors and power equipment manufacturers aren’t surprised. Cities have been banning and restricting the use of leaf blowers almost as long as the devices have been in the United States.
Landscape contractors generally aren’t opposed to reasonable restrictions that encourage blower buy-back programs promoting low-noise units, operator training and time of use restrictions. But they say blind, outright blower bans are unfair and unnecessary when the issue can be addressed with less severe ordinances. All-out bans strap landscape maintenance businesses, hindering their ability to do their jobs in the most efficient, profitable way. Maintaining a property without using a blower increases costs 20 to 40 percent, according to the Professional Landcare Network (PLANET).
| TALKING POINTS |
When the blower issue makes it to a legislative body, typically an indiscriminate ban has been proposed and it’s up to local contractors and other users to propose reasonable restrictions. At these meetings, it’s common for opponents to cite erroneous information. Here are some common misconceptions and talking points for contractors to clear the air and bring solutions to the table. Misconception: “Brooms and rakes work just fine.” Misconception: “Blowers can damage hearing.” Misconception: “A single gas-powered blower emits as much pollution in a year as 80 cars.” Sources: OPEI, PLANET and CLCA |
Blower ban advocates often organize on the Web and drum up support by arguing their cases on the local newspaper’s op-ed page. However, they underestimate the costs to landscape contractors, equipment dealers or other businesses whose livelihood is sustained in part by blowers. They believe brooms, rakes and hand tools can adequately replace blowers, yet fail to acknowledge the associated cost increases and difficulty in passing these costs on to customers.
“I’ve had a city councilman tell me, what’s wrong with using a broom? It’s good exercise,” says Bob Wade, director of legislation for the California Landscape Contractors Association. “My response is, it might be good exercise if you’re doing your backyard on a Saturday morning, but we do this all day long all week long.”
Wade’s company, Wade Landscape in Laguna Beach, Calif., draws 40 percent of its revenue from maintenance in a market where blowers, even electric ones, have been banned outright for more than five years. His company has adapted, using rakes, brooms and vacuums where permitted, but blower prohibition has cut into profits. It costs his company 40 percent more to maintain properties in cities where blowers are banned. Not to mention, it hinders growth. “That’s a lot of labor that could be used to do something more productive,” he adds.
Another problem is getting customers to realize that manual cleanup doesn’t compare to a blower’s ability to remove debris from a yard. “We can’t raise someone 40 percent and not do a better job,” he says. “I told my customers, we’ll clean it as much as we can, but you’re going to have to accept a little more debris when we leave a job. For the most part people will say OK, then they’ll call a few weeks later and say, ‘Can’t you get it any cleaner?’ We’re stuck absorbing most of that cost,” Wade says. “There really is no good answer.”
While companies like Wade’s do their best to adapt, technology has shifted much of the concern into the hands of blower users. “As the industry has addressed the issues of both sound level and sound quality, the issue tends to be on courteous and common-sense use of blowers,” says Scott Tilley, general counsel for Stihl, Virginia Beach, Va., and chair of the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute’s blower task force.
It’s now incumbent on contractors in communities without blower laws to operate their machines in a responsible manner. Buying low-noise devices, training operators to use them properly and courteously and correcting public misconceptions will quell the spread of no-blow laws.
THE GREAT DEBATE. Invented in Japan in the early 1970s, leaf blowers soon arrived in the U.S., welcomed by maintenance contractors and homeowners as an alternative to using water for lawn and garden cleanup.
In 1975, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif., a self-described Bohemian Mecca, was one of the first communities to ban blowers, deeming them a public nuisance. Three years later affluent, star-studded Beverly Hills did the same. By 2000, 20 California cities had blower bans on the books (usually addressing gas blowers in residential areas) and 80 cities had ordinances restricting their use, according to a report in 2000 by the California Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Resources Board (CARB). At that time, it’s estimated that 400-plus communities around the country had enacted such restrictions and that number has no doubt multiplied today.
In most cases, blower opponents cry “nuisance.” Of all power equipment, blowers take a beating because the high-pitched frequency of noise they emit is considered obnoxious. Where mowers hum and chainsaws buzz, blowers whine, opponents say.
In addition to the noise pollution argument, activists have tried to ban blowers based on the environmental and health impacts of exhaust emissions and fugitive dust.
Over the last two decades, blower manufacturers have succeeded in significantly reducing both noise and emissions levels. When blowers were first introduced to the United States, they operated at a noise level of about 78 decibels measured at 50 feet.
Today, many manufacturers produce blowers that operate at 65 decibels or less, which doesn’t seem like much of a reduction, but is, considering a 6 decibel reduction reduces the sound level by 50 percent. That makes today’s low-noise blowers about 75 percent quieter than their predecessors, Tilley says.
In addition, manufacturers have implemented improvements in engine technology, fan design, tube design and material usage to reduce sound levels, says Jeff Nesom, product manager of hand-held equipment for Husqvarna, Charlotte, N.C.
Exhaust emissions are usually secondary to the debate, as the EPA regulates and sets emissions standards for hand-held equipment much like it does for automobiles. In fact, it’s illegal under the federal Clean Air Act for cities and states other than California to regulate mobile source emissions. The EPA and CARB emissions standards put into place since the 1990s have reduced exhaust emissions by 70 to 90 percent, Tilley says.
Another concern in the blower debate is particulate matter, or dust that’s kicked into the air during blower operation. Studies have shown that health risks are associated with breathing in such matter, including respiratory symptoms and other illnesses, even mortality, according to the CARB report. Some particulate matter concerns can be mitigated by training operators on proper blower use and dust-reduction tactics (see “Leaf Blower Operation Tips” on page 65). However, it’s not clear that blowers generate more dust than brooms and other debris-removing methods.
PREVENTIVE MEASURES. “A lot of times, by the time it shows up in the city council or state legislature, you’re already way behind on trying to get a solution in place because the war already has been fought on the ground and the troops have been garnered on the other side of the issue,” says James McNew, OPEI’s vice president of technical and statistical services.
Wade witnessed this difficulty firsthand, when the practice of restricting blowers was rampant in California in the early 2000s. “We fought very hard, lobbying legislators, partnering with manufacturers, doing all we could to stop the steady advance of no-blower legislation,” he says. “We saved some cities, we lost a whole bunch of them, and I don’t think we’re ever going to get those ordinances overturned.”
In preventing the advance of blower-banning ordinances, technology, education and etiquette should be front and center. “You want to get out ahead of the problems,” McNew says. “We as an industry can make a huge impact by practicing and using the equipment in a safe, courteous fashion and replacing older equipment with the latest technology.”
Investing in the low-noise units will keep complaints to a minimum. The noise level on most of these blowers is 65 decibels or less, about the level of normal conversation. This is a significant reduction from the original blowers that operated in the high-70-decibel range. Until two years ago, purchasing a low-noise unit might have meant sacrificing performance, weight and cost, because the quieter models available were modifications of regular models. When low-noise blowers first came out, manufacturers often used more material to better enclose the engine to keep the noise down, Nesom says. Those factors increased cost, didn’t improve performance and created a weight penalty of about 1 pound.
Today’s quieter blowers are “purpose-built” with improved fan designs, sound-absorbing materials and engines designed to run at a slower speed. Most of the low-noise units with displacement levels in the 50- to 60-cc range perform comparably to the non-low-noise blowers, Nesom says. The cost of these units, which last three to five years, are about $50 to $100 more than their non-low-noise counterparts.
Once maintenance field staffs have the cleanest, quietest blowers in their arsenals, they should be trained on how to best use them. Untrained, conscienceless contractors who overuse blowers and run them at full-throttle at 5 a.m. are usually to blame for creating the problems associated with common-sense, courteous use.
Much of the problem stems from operator error, Wade says. “I see trucks pull up and the first machine that comes off the truck is the blower,” he says. “In our operation, that’s the last machine that gets used.” In addition, the variation in throttle-level adds to the obnoxious sound. Wade trains his employees only to operate blowers on idle, not hit the gas up and down. “If you can’t move the pile with the blower idling, then get the rake out,” he says.
CLCA President Peter Estournes, vice president of Healdsburg, Calif.-based Gardenworks, agrees that training is necessary. “Blowers are obnoxious machines that happen to be extremely efficient for cleaning up,” he says. “We strive to lessen their impact on our employees and our clients by training our crews to use them responsibly.” He requires blower operators to follow California OSHA rules, which include wearing eye and ear protection. He also supplies employees with dust masks, though they’re not mandatory. (See “Leaf Blower Operation Tips” on page 65 for a cut-out safety and training sheet.)
Although Gardenworks operates in a region that has not yet had to combat blower bans like in many other areas of the state, it conducts blower training with maintenance employees when they’re hired, twice more each year and in the event of misuse. He says the only costs are downtime for training, which is included in the company’s budget and recovered in overhead or general conditions.
Estournes has never had a complaint about blower noise and only once has received one about blower operation near an open window.
In the event of blower misuse or safety violations, Estournes warns the offender and includes a written notice in the employee’s file. After three violations he’ll have a meeting with the employee; if problems persist he’ll let the employee go. He’s even temporarily regulated blower use at his company. “There have been instances where I’ve actually pulled the machines off the trucks if the crews violated the rules,” he says. “We’re trying to train our guys that this is a very useful tool and to be without it creates a hardship.”
In places where the issue is past the point of prevention and already has been introduced to legislative bodies, contractors shouldn’t just pray for reasonable restrictions. Often arguments against the use of blowers are based on erroneous information, and it’s up to the people who are locally affected to correct those misconceptions.
As OPEI’s McNew says: “Fighting against something is not nearly as easy and effective as trying to propose a solution.”
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