Ditch gas leaf blowers & leave the leaves

There are so many reasons to stop using gas leaf blowers and to leave our leaves!

Gas leaf blowers emit massive amounts of carbon pollution!

In 2020, fossil fuel-powered lawn equipment emitted more than 30 million tons of carbon dioxide, the leading driver of climate change. To put that in context, that’s as much carbon pollution as comes out of the tailpipes of 6.6 million cars over the course of a year. And that’s more carbon pollution emitted by gas-powered lawn equipment in one year than was emitted by the entire city of Los Angeles in 2021. With millions of Gas-powered leaf blowers, snow blowers, lawnmowers, weed trimmers and chainsaws owned and operated across the country, their climate-warming pollution really adds up.

A 2011 study by Edmunds found that a two-stroke gasoline-powered leaf blower spewed out more pollution than a 6,200-pound Ford F-150 SVT Raptor pickup truck.

Jason Kavanagh, the engineering editor at Edmunds at the time, noted that “hydrocarbon emissions from a half-hour of yard work with the two-stroke leaf blower are about the same as a 3,900-mile drive from Texas to Alaska in a Raptor.”

Pollinators need leaves!

Protect Pollinators who protect all of us! The trouble with leaf blowers isn’t only their pollution-spewing health consequences. It’s also the damage they do to biodiversity. One of the most valuable things you can do to support pollinators and other invertebrates is to provide them with the shelter they need to survive the winter. Thankfully, that’s pretty easy; all you need to do is do less yard work.

With gratitude to the folllowing organizations for these resources and their work:

https://environmentamerica.org/center/articles/leaf-blowers-arent-just-noisy-theyre-also-huge-climate-polluters/

https://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/story/60841/how-fall-yard-maintenance-can-help-protect-pollinators/

https://xerces.org/blog/leave-the-leaves

https://www.nwf.org/Magazines/National-Wildlife/2015/OctNov/Gardening/Leave-the-Leaves