On a peaceful Saturday morning the suburban curse announces itself this way:
vvvvWWAAAHHHHHHHH
mmmMWMAAAAAAWAAAAHHHHH
NNNNAAAAHHHHHHHHHH
VVMMMAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH
brum brum brum brum
HYYYAYAAAAAAAHHHHHHHNNNNHHHHNNN
The sound is several houses away but at a decibel level that sets my teeth on edge. A neighbour is moving leaves off his lawn with his new petrol-driven leaf blower.
I’m not alone in my dislike for these damned machines. Last week I got an email from a Mrs D de Suza in a ‘formerly peaceful KZN village’ asking Daily Maverick for help – any kind of help. Her life, she wrote, is becoming increasingly less peaceful due to noise from leaf blowers and weed eaters. “Insects, lizards etc are blown away by them together with the leaves. Leaves are surely not so bad? Why are they unwanted? Plastic litter lies around for years.”
The sound of blowers obviously had an effect on semi-South African tech entrepreneur who is almost as irritating as a leaf blower: Elon Musk. On X he texted: “Tesla is going to develop a quiet, electric leaf blower.”
He means battery-operated of course so you don’t have to trail a cord behind you which literally has its limits. It wasn’t his idea, there were a few around, but if he can build a rocket to get to Mars there’s hope for a reliable, inexpensive solution to my Saturday mornings.
However, that was in 2019 and it hasn’t happened yet. Maybe he got too busy landing booster rockets without crashing them and campaigning for Donald Trump. But I appreciate his sentiment: leaf blowers and weed eaters are awful pieces of gardening equipment.
Let's begin with the sound. I watch council workers with blowers and their close cousin, weedeaters, attacking road verges and parks. Have you ever seen them wearing ear protection or dust masks (or face masks because weedeaters sling stones)? No? Me neither.
Incidentally, these guys also kill vagrant grass along pavement edges with leaf-murdering Roundup without masks. Clearly, they are expendable labour.
Extended exposure to anything above 55 decibels causes hearing damage and a leaf blower hits 100 or more. That doesn’t just go for its operator, but also the guy several houses removed. Noise pollution can cause stress, headaches, difficulty sleeping, productivity loss, higher heart attack rates…all that crappy stuff.
If you ever watch leaf chasers, you’ll notice it’s not an exact science. It’s like herding butterflies. They’re annoyingly inefficient machines. They blast into the air leaves and everything else lying around and a breeze happily puts them back where they came from. To get a decent pile to scrape into a bag takes five times the effort of using a leaf rake.
And there’s dust, deadly particulates from traffic tyres, mould, spores, aerosolized bird shit, pesticide particles you shouldn’t invite into your lungs at any cost and insects that need leaves to produce all the nutrients that the soil needs to grow a healthy lawn and garden.
Leaf blowers generate wind speeds of nearly 300 kilometres an hour and on a calm day the dust can take hours to settle.
Removing leaves is breaking a cycle of life that’s sustained it for millions of years. Trees soak up nutrients from mycorrhizal networks around their roots and redistribute them through fallen leaves. Along the way, this provides other essential cycles for wonderful little creatures that thrive under the fallen canopy. They love fallen leaves. Leaf blowers blast their world to smithereens.
We need to be kind to insects. Ever heard of the insect apocalypse? The planet is running out of them. A German etymological society collected 27 years of splat reports of insects hitting cars and found a reduction of 75%. Without them, we wouldn’t survive a month.
Then there’s emissions. On a basic exhaust level, the pollutants a two-stroke engine leaf blower emits into the world are hundreds of times worse than your car. These include carbon monoxide, which contributes to ground-level ozone, nitrous oxides which contribute to smog formation, hydrocarbons which can be carcinogenic and nitrous oxides, which can cause acid rain.
One study reported by the Sierra Club showed that under normal usage conditions, a leaf blower two-stroke engine emits nearly 300 times the hydrocarbons of a Ford Raptor and loads of carbon monoxide and nitrous oxides as well.
If you drove the Raptor for several thousand kilometres, the amount of hydrocarbons emitted would be equivalent to using the two-stroke leaf blower for about half an hour of yard work. Hard to believe but the science is there.
Okay excuse my irritation, I’ve had my middle-class suburban gripe, but that idiot down the road is still blasting leaves.
vvvvWWAAAHHHHHHHH
mmmMWMAAAAAAWAAAAHHHHH
brum brum brum brum.
WHEN WILL IT STOP?
Hold up messing around with rockets and elections, Elon. You’re urgently needed in the gardening tools department. DM