Raise your hand if you’re old enough to remember passengers puffing on cigarettes in airplanes and smoking cigars on the Long Island Rail Road. What about riding in the front seat of your parents’ car with no seatbelt or any restraint other than your mom’s outstretched arm? How about the good, old days when even the most well-mannered moviegoers dumped their popcorn buckets on the floor of the theater and strolled out as the credits rolled?
Norms change. And it’s time for a norm change around gas leaf blowers.
It’s easy to accept the seemingly petty annoyance of something like leaf blowers as simply what’s normal, but, if we pause to look around, it becomes clear that many other municipalities no longer consider either the noise or the pollution acceptable. In Zurich, gas-powered leaf blowers are banned year-round, and electric ones are only allowed in the fall, from October to December. In the Netherlands, where “silent gardening” has become the standard, cities including Amsterdam and Utrecht are phasing out gas-powered landscape equipment. In California, the beach cities of Santa Monica, Manhattan Beach, and Hermosa Beach have banned leaf-blowing altogether and landscapers have returned to rakes. Even Southampton Village has banned gas blowers, period, year-round.
These changes are happening not just because leaf blowers are just an aural irritation, but because they are genuinely a menace to biodiversity and human health.
According to the California Air Resources Board, using a gas leaf blower for just one hour creates as much smog-forming pollution as driving a Toyota Camry for 1,100 miles. Leaf blowers emit high levels of formaldehyde, benzene, and fine particulate matter — right under the nose of the operator, who inhales these toxins, making them a workplace-safety issue, too. Further, these machines are insect-killers, sweeping away biodiversity; their 200-mile-per-hour wind speeds don’t just move leaves but blast away the leaf litter layer where bees, butterflies, and fireflies overwinter.
And, yes, gas leaf blowers disturb our peace. According to an article in the Journal of Environmental and Toxicological Studies, while the racket from electric blowers becomes indistinguishable from background neighborhood noise at fairly short distances, the sound from a single gas blower is clearly audible at 800 feet. One gas-powered leaf blower creates a circle of noise and irritation that harasses the entire neighborhood.
Right now, there are time and date restrictions on gas leaf blower usage in place in both East Hampton Town and East Hampton Village, year round, with summer bans on gas ones. It’s a bit convoluted: You can’t use them during certain hours, which differ between the jurisdictions and from season to season, or on Sundays. But, again, please raise your hand if you regularly see landscape crews — commonly, two and three people at a time — blasting away with gas blowers, rules be damned? It’s basically impossible to police, with the number of yard workers on the job on any given sunny day.
ChangeHampton is currently circulating a petition for East Hampton Town to cut to the chase and simply ban the use of gas blowers outright. We agree: The time has come. Let’s get with it.