Ah, the joys of summertime in New Jersey! The sun, the flowers, the beaches! But what about the damn leaf blowers? Can we not rid ourselves of this scourge and reclaim the outdoors? What good is a beautiful deck if these monstrous screamers send you fleeing inside behind closed windows every weekend? “I have a beautiful wrap-around porch, and I’ve set it up with chairs with cushions – you could live out there,” says Lisa Mochello, a therapist whose home sits in a leafy section of Highland Park. “I can sit there and listen to the birds, or read a book, or even work out there.” But most days, she says, the demons invade.
Landscaping crews pile out of their trucks, sometimes on both sides of her, and rev up their two-stroke engines, a technology that dates to 1881 and is so filthy it creates as much pollution in a single hour as a modern car does driving 1,100 miles, according to the California Air Resources Board. “When one company leaves, another arrives,” Mochello says, “It’s constant. The noise is so bad.
I can’t even believe it’s legal.” Maybe not for long in New Jersey. Sen.
Bob Smith, the Democratic chairman of the Environment Committee, is pushing a bill that would ban these contraptions , with some exceptions, and provide financial help to ease the transition to electric blowers, which are much cleaner and quieter. His committee approved his bill in June, and he intends to make a fresh push for final approval this fall. “Homeowners love this,” Smith says.
“They’re asking why we didn’t do this sooner.” A ban on gas-power blowers goes into effect next year in California. And local governments across the country have banned them as well, including Maplewood and Montclair.
The liberation movement is building steam. Most landscaping firms are not happy about this, and Smith is trying to soften the blow with amendments. Aside from the financial help, the bill phases in the change over two years.
And it allows four-stroke gas engines, which are less polluting, in non-residential areas during the spring and fall. Can the landscapers somehow manage with electric blowers? Some of them already are. Amner DeLeon is the owner of Blue Sky Green Earth , a landscaping firm he began during the pandemic, when conventional leaf blowers were driving him nuts during his stay at home.
He uses all electric equipment now, including leaf blowers, mowers, and trimmers. He started in Princeton and has now expanded to Montclair and Madison. Yes, he said, there was an up-front cost to buy the new equipment.
But he says it’s cheaper to run, so he can match prices of conventional landscapers. His clients love it, he says, and his employees are overjoyed. “They’re not breathing those fumes,” he says.
“And the noise level is lower. So it’s better for their lungs and their ears, not to mention the vibrations that can affect the nerves.” It may be blasphemous to say this, but I wonder if the core problem is cultural, this drive to build a suburban yard that is perfectly manicured, an unbroken stretch of thick green grass, every blade standing at attention in its assigned spot.
Bah humbug. Why not loosen up? Why not plant indigenous plant species that give bees and butterflies a home? Why not limit the grass to small plots, like area rugs in a room, not wall-to-wall carpeting? Why not mulch the leaves and allow the scraps to nourish the soil? Why squeeze out nature in its glorious variety to make room for the anal-retentive grass lawns that dominate Jersey suburbs? “We have to change what people think of as a beautiful yard,” says Lois Kraus of Westfield, co-chair of Advocates for Transforming Landscaping in New Jersey, a group she says meets quarterly and has members in 60 towns. “I have all kinds of native flowers, shrubs and trees, not the highly manicured green, which is not healthy for the environment, or for human beings.
“It’s not just the landscapers who have to change; it’s the residents.” For now, that’s a bridge too far for most people. But ever since I heard about this movement, the great sweeping lawns of Upper Montclair have started to look silly to me, as wasteful as driving a Hummer.
But as a first step, we should be able to agree that the dirty gas leaf blowers must go. Next time you are forced to go inside and shut the windows to escape them, consider dropping a note to your local legislator. A better world is within easy reach.
More: Tom Moran columns Tom Moran may be reached at [email protected] or (973) 986-6951. Follow him on Twitter @tomamoran .
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