According to a very exciting experiment by Edmund’s Inside Line, a leaf blower is extremely unfriendly for the environment. For this test session they picked a Ford F-150 Raptor 4×4 with a 410BHP V8 engine, a small “eco-friendly” Fiat 500 with a 1.4-litre engine and a couple of leaf blowers – just like the ones that many of us are using in our gardens.
The test (it’s standard in the USA) is called FTP 75 and consists of 3 phases. The vehicles are fixed on roller-bars and “driven” for 11.04 miles simulating the usual driving pattern: it includes acceleration, deceleration, idling and steady cruising. Unfortunately, the garden leaf blowers don’t have wheels! To get comparable results, the blowers were also idled, accelerated and decelerated.
The results are stunning! Please note that CO2 wasn’t measured in this test because… well, I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again – it’s not the worst of the greenhouse or pollutant gases but because the marketing departments of large manufacturers find it easier to work with CO2 data, they’re using it for different purposes!
No, for this test they looked at hydrocarbons, nitrogen compounds and carbon monoxide.
There are two surprises in this test. One: the V8 Raptor cleans the air of hydrocarbons! Yes, the content of hydrocarbons in Raptors exhaust was lower than what “clean” air contains.
The surprise number 2… or is it really a surprise?… the garden leaf blowers are extremely bad for the environment.
| Ford Raptor | 0.005 | 0.005 | 0.276 |
| Fiat 500 | 0.016 | 0.010 | 0.192 |
| Ryobi 4-stroke leaf blower | 0.182 | 0.031 | 3.714 |
| Echo 2-stroke leaf blower | 1.495 | 0.010 | 6.445 |
The gas emission values are given in grams per minute and represent (from left to right) hydrocarbons, nitrous oxides and CO.
As you can see, 2-stroke leaf blowers are the worst. There are stringent regulations for the vehicle emissions but there seem to be no regulations whatsoever for garden equipment. Not fair!
So, if you consider yourself a green gardener, you’d be doing all right to choose what’s best for the planet – a leaf rake! No noise, no emissions and keeps you fit!
