Environmental impact of lawn mowers and leaf blowers
Yahoo Finance’s Rick Newman provides insight on restraining the use of leaf blowers and lawn mowers.
Video transcript
- Here to explain it all is Yahoo Finance's Rick Newman. I have to tell you, our producers have been anticipating this story all morning long. I don't get it. What is all the noise about, literally and figuratively?
RICK NEWMAN: Well, if you live in the city, maybe you have this concept of the suburbs as these peaceful, quiet enclaves. They're nothing like that, especially in the fall, because of these leaf blowers that are just constantly blowing. To some people like me, this is the scourge of the suburbs. People get in fights over people using their leaf blowers because this is 110 decibels in some cases. It's as loud as a rock concert. And they're just going all around you. So I've been complaining to my neighbors about this for years. And it drove me so crazy that
I finally decided to do something about it this year. I told my neighbors that when they or their landscaping crews start blasting their leaf blowers, I'm going to respond by putting my 70 watt guitar amplifier outside and playing hip hop music or heavy metal at them for at least as long as they blast their leaf blower at me. So my neighborhood is probably a little bit louder than it used to be. But for once, I'm making some of the noise in response to them. And it makes me feel better. I'm not quietly stewing anymore. I am raging at the machines and letting everybody know it.
- Rick, I had an intelligent and thoughtful question to you about the environment. But instead, I just want to get-- I want to dig into this a little bit more. And what else are you complaining to your neighbors about? And what kind of change are you affecting in your neighborhood?
RICK NEWMAN: OK. So because I am so vociferous about these obnoxious leaf blowers, I have decided to limit it to the leaf blowers and not be the person everybody hates for everything else. So I try to be a good neighbor on other things. I helped out a lot when we had flooding in my neighborhood. I loaned people everything I had, from fans to ladders and tools and things like that.
So I don't know if people love me or hate me. They probably don't know what to decide. And we actually could and perhaps should talk about the environmental issue here for just a second. I mean, leaf blowers and lawn mowers, they're really terrible polluters because they have no pollution control. They have no sound control. So they pollute both greenhouse gases and noise. And President Biden is talking a lot about this transition to green energy. He's going to be at the big climate conference in Scotland starting this weekend.
So one place to start is to limit the use of these machines that are really putting tons of pollution into the air and making all this racket at the same time. There are battery powered options out there. They're good enough for me. If you have a small lawn, they're fine. But for some reason people just feel wedded to these obnoxious machines that blow leaves and dirt around. Put it where you want for five seconds until the wind comes along and puts it back where it was to start with. So that is my pitch to my fellow suburbanites. Kill the leaf blowers.
- I have little sympathy living in the city where I'm dealing with jackhammers, and drills, and cranes all day long.
RICK NEWMAN: Yeah. I get it. You have leaf blowers there too. But maybe you just can't hear them over the jackhammers.
- You can't hear them. Exactly. But I do want to point out I read a survey that says an hour of leaf blowing is like driving a Camry 1,100 miles, as far as the pollution effect. So there definitely is--
RICK NEWMAN: That's not a survey. That's just a fact of the amount of pollution that comes out of one of these things. So if you use one of these for a single day. It's emitting more pollution than a car emits during an entire year of typical driving. That's part of the reason California is banning the sale of these types of gas-powered engines starting in 2024. In New York State where I live is considering it. Many cities ban the use of these things because they're so bad. This is really like 1960s-era technology that shouldn't be around anymore. But people have the machines. And they're going to use them, I guess.
