Stop Noise Pollution: Ban The Leaf Blower
The leaf blower is one garden tool that ought to be banned. There is no justification for the noise pollution it causes, and there are pleasant alternatives to technology that generates hurricane-force winds.
The contraption makes a dull but intense noise, and it reverberates in the head like a toothache or a dentist’s drill. The user often has ear plugs. The rest of us do not. If you happen to walk within 20 feet of the machine when it is going at full blast, the sound can be earsplitting. Otherwise, the roar everyone hates makes your ears ring long after it has stopped.
It may be of comfort to know that today most workers in commercial landscape businesses are adequately protected with ear plugs, dust masks and safety glasses.
We also are told that the latest models of leaf blowers are a little quieter than they used to be, pollute less and are as light as 10 pounds.
However, I have yet to see a leaf-blower operator who shows anything but strain on his face while performing his task. Some pets are terrified by the device. The ad copywriters who say the machines make “fall cleanup a breeze” have a poor understanding of wind velocity. The air comes out at about 150 mph.
To Haskell Small, a composer and a concert pianist who lives here in Washington, D.C., the leaf blower is “intolerable,” particularly when he tries to write music. “When I play music, I usually can drown out the sound of a leaf blower,” he says. “But when I try to compose or write a letter, there is no way for me to listen to my inner voice, and the leaf blower blanks out all the harmonic combinations.”
The noise a leaf blower makes is “piercing,” Small says. To him, the worst part is when a band of workers, as many as five, attack a neighbor’s yard, blowers going full blast, for as long as an hour, seemingly in competition. “Each blower has a different beat,” the musician says. “They do not have the same tone. They sound terrible when they are together.”
On several occasions, Small has talked to them about the annoyance. “They tell me that this is how they earn their living, and that’s that,” he says. “They tell me to go away. But often they blow the leaves down to the street, and they do not seem to mind that little by little the wind picks up the pile and eventually blows back most of the leaves. It all seems so pointless.”
The argument for the leaf blower is that it’s a time-saving, labor-saving device. It even picks up small particles that rakes cannot cope with. This may have some merit in the commercial world, but wouldn’t customers be willing to pay a little extra for manual cleanup and a neighborhood’s peace and quiet?
And if you’re doing it yourself, is it really so terrible to clean up a lawn or a flower garden with a sturdy, old-fashioned lawn rake, make small piles at your own comfortable pace, and then bag them or haul them away on a wheelbarrow and dump it all onto the compost pile? Those dead leaves and other debris are immensely valuable to the garden after they are decomposed and turned into soil. We could do far worse things with our precious time than walk around on a crisp fall afternoon with a rake to pick up withered leaves, and think back to the glories of the season past.