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Gas-powered leaf blowers: lifeline or life-destroying?
Alder Avshalom-Smith: Blowers hurt breathers; ban hurts businesses.
The environmentalists said: The persistent roar of gas-powered leaf blowers pollute the air and cause long-term health and environmental damage.
The landscapers whose income currently depends on those leaf blowers said: Advocates who want to ban them are out of touch.
“I want to see how many calluses they have,” said one professional.
Those two sides squared off in the Board of Alders chamber at City Hall on Thursday evening armed with statistics, rebuttals, and in one case, photographic surveillance of another testifier.
They testified before the Alders’ City Services and Environmental Policy committee during a workshop on a potential city ban of the gas-powered leaf blowers — and ignited discussion about the urgency of environmental action, the collective consequences of personal choices, and the economic burdens of industry-wide changes that often fall on working-class shoulders.
The city’s Environmental Advisory Council has been advocating for the Board of Alders to consider a phase-out or ban on gas-powered leaf blowers, hoping to spur a transition among local landscaping companies to electric machines.
Gas-powered leaf blowers use two-stroke engines that run on a combination of gasoline and oil, and they are less expensive than electric leaf blowers (although testifiers on Thursday disagreed on the scale of that cost discrepancy).
Alders weren’t yet weighing a particular piece of legislation, Rather, they heard testimony about leaf blowers in the form of a “workshop” to inform any future action on the matter. Over 100 other municipalities and 15 states have enacted gas leaf blower bans.
Environmentalists: No Right To Pollute
The Environmental Advisory Council has cited air pollutants emitted from gas-powered leaf blowers — including volatile organic compounds, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and fine particulate matter — as one key reason the devices should be banned or phased out.
The council’s proposal also focuses on the gas blowers’ loud noise, which they said can range from 95 to 115 decibels at the operator’s ear and from 65 to 75 decibels from 50 feet away.
Advocates noted on Thursday that the sound can damage human hearing and interrupt wildlife activity. Some said their ability to enjoy time outside, or even in their homes, is frequently disrupted by the loud whir of gas leaf blowers.
According to Viveca Morris, the executive director of Yale’s Law, Ethics, and Animals Program, the sound of leaf blowers affects bird behavior, which can in turn have consequences for local pest control and pollination.
Some local environmental activists stressed that their goal was not to ban leaf blowing altogether, but to spark a widespread shift toward greener landscaping supplies. They argued that a shift to electric leaf blowing would mitigate environmental, health, and noise concerns. (Some landscapers, meanwhile, dispute that electric leaf blowers are significantly quieter.)
“The goal here is electrification,” said Mary Woolsey. “It’s not to outlaw all types of leaf blowers.”
Florestine Taylor argued that an ordinance phasing out gas leaf blowers would aid small businesses in making the transition before other regulatory agencies require it.
“This is an opportunity where people don’t have to be left behind,” she said. “The change is coming.” Taylor added that she’s concerned about the consequences of inhaling toxins and withstanding loud noise for hours on end each day when it comes to the landscapers’ health.
Others, meanwhile, contended that any type of leaf blowing can be damaging to the earth.
Suzanne Roberts argued that “blowing all the leaves away is a terrible idea” because “they have a function.” Leaf-clearing “deprives plants and wildlife of mulch,” she said. When necessary, those testifiers urged landscapers to rake leaves by hand rather than using mechanical methods of leaf-clearing.
“I don’t think that everyone has a right to pollute,” she said.
Activism or Harrassment?
Laura Cahn.
Laura Cahn arrived at the Board of Alders’ chamber prepared: she carried printed-out photographs she’d taken of the landscapers who worked across the street from her Westville home — evidence, she contended, of a handful of violations by Greater New Haven Landscaping, Inc., the company leading the opposition to the ban.
Cahn, who chairs the Environmental Advisory Council, accused Greater New Haven Landscaping of running three gas-powered leaf blowers at once, which she said generated enough noise to travel through layers of windows to the back of her house. She also photographed the landscapers leaf-blowing without personal protective equipment such as face masks.
“I do not believe I should have to wear ear protection in my own home,” Cahn said.
A few speakers later, Casey Frawley — whose father, Mike Frawley, owns Greater New Haven Landscaping and initiated the public hearing in defense of gas-powered leaf blowers — approached the alders.
“I’m the person across the street” whom Cahn photographed, the younger Frawley said.
“I do not give her any permission to take my photograph,” he stated. He said his previous interactions with Cahn amounted to “harassment”: “I get sworn at, I get told she’s gonna call the cops on me,” he alleged.
Landscapers: Not For The "Common Man"
Paul Bass Photo
Michael Frawley, left, at a 2016 community meeting.
Casey Frawley also took issue with environmentalists’ statements of concern over landscapers’ health.
“The notion that they’re trying to look out for us from a health standpoint, that’s not true. We’re fine,” he said.
His father, Mike Frawley, rebutted other arguments in favor of a gas blower ban. He said that simply raking leaves by hand is not a feasible business model for landscapers who are paid to work all day, at a certain pace.
He said that electric leaf-blowing technology is not as effective, yet far more expensive, compared to gas-powered blowers. He estimated that the average gas-powered blower costs about $600, while electric blowers can cost $2,500, in his experience.
“To survive in this business is not easy,” Frawley said. “The only people who are going to be able to afford this equipment are people like Yale University, who have an unlimited endowment and budget … but for the common man, it’s just not going to happen.”
The burden of transitioning to electric-powered tools will fall on small businesses already struggling to make it through supply-chain hiccups, labor shortages, and inflation, Frawley said. “These people deserve the credit for making New Haven’s neighborhoods clean and beautiful.”
As for concerns about the environmental impact, Frawley questioned why residents are targeting leaf blowers and not other two-stroke engine tools like lawn mowers and chainsaws.
Finally, Frawley compared the decibel range of a gas-powered blower to the volume of vacuum cleaners and hand drills.
“There’s some people that complain about children playing on the playground,” Frawley said. There are going to be things that annoy people as far as noise goes,” but leaf blowing is “a fact of life.“
Woolsey countered that since decibels are a logarithmic measure, a 95-decibel leaf blower, for instance, is 100 times louder than a 75-decibel vacuum cleaner, marking a significance difference in volume.
Woolsey added that in addition to a sound’s decibel, its ability to travel far depends on its frequency — and gas leaf blowers, she said, have a particularly low frequency compared to lawn mowers and other devices. “As many as 90 homes can be affected by the sound of leaf blowers” at one time, she said.
Other environmental activists noted that alders had recently declared a “Climate Emergency” in 2019. Climate change is too urgent an issue to justify waiting for technology to improve, they argued.
Another landscaper, who identified himself as Carlos, pointed out that a majority of testifiers against gas-powered leaf blowing live in the wealthier neighborhoods of East Rock and Westville. He described his typical work day tending to lawns across these neighborhoods: “I wake up at 7 in the morning, I did not have lunch, I didn’t have dinner yet,” he said at around 8:30 p.m.
“They are living in a different world,” Carlos said of the anti-leaf-blower advocates. “I want to see how many calluses they have.”
Transition With Aid?
Thursday's City Services and Environmental Policy Committee meeting.
Reflecting on the issue after public testimony concluded, alders came away from the hearing with different takeaways.
Prospect Hill/Dixwell/Newhallville alder Steve Winter said the ban would be a matter of environmental justice.
“We have the 11th worst asthma rate in the entire United States,” Winter said. We need to do something about it. We can’t just ignore it.”
Hill South Alder Kampton Singh, meanwhile, said he believes “the technology is still in its infancy … I hope that we, as a committee, will look into that.”
Newhallville Alder Devin Avshalom-Smith expressed conflicting impulses.
“I think about independent contractors in my ward, primarily people of color who are not rich,” Avshalom-Smith said. “I don’t anticipate that they’d be able to afford new electric machines right now. I could see this putting a lot of local businesses out of business”
At the same time, he said, when he thinks of his ward, “I also consider the people who would be affected” most by the health hazards of air pollution and climate change.
He concluded that alders should implement “some sort of assistance for small businesses in order for gas powered to be phased out. We would have to help the local industry prepare for the change.”
East Rock Alder Anna Festa suggested that alders consider a trade-in program to ease businesses’ transition to electric-powered blowers.
“We really don’t have a choice. It is for human health, and the health of our environment,” she said. “Change is already here.”
Environmentalists are indeed a strange bunch. All this pie-in-the-sky nonsense. The "goal is electrification". Ok - we'll all use batteries that are made from combiantions of plastic(pertroleum based) and certain mined minerals(eco-damage) that are not unlimited, have a definitive shelf-life, are non-recyclable, therefore environmentally unfriendly, and take fossil-fuel generated electricity to charge, and repeatedly charge them up for use. Freedom isn't free, neither is electricity - it comes from somewhere.