A remedy for the global blaring crisis
Union Tribune (San Diego)
August 29, 2006

Imagine a world without leaf blowers. Or at least quieter ones.

In February, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which has jurisdiction in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, launched the state's first public incentive program to exchange noisy, smelly backpack leaf blowers with quieter, cleaner models.

The short-lived program offered 1,500 new four-cycle blowers made by STIHL Inc., advertised as significantly cleaner (the typical two-cycle blower emits as much pollution as 80 new cars), with the added bonus of being 14 percent quieter than the old blowers. “All the trade-ins were crushed at a recycling center,” reports Dan Skinner, Visalia branch manager for Pacific STIHL.

Three months later, the San Diego Air Pollution Control District introduced a one-day program offering residents a good deal: trade old gasoline-powered lawnmowers for new Black & Decker electric mowers.

While electric mowers emit zero pollutants, an older gasoline-powered mower can create 40 times more pollution per hour “than a late model automobile,” reports Anita Tinsley, who works for the local district.

“The fact that electric mowers are much quieter is just an extra benefit,” she adds.

Noise shouldn't be an afterthought, and trade-in programs shouldn't be a novelty.

Policymakers and the public seldom consider excessive environmental noise in the same league as air pollution, yet it may be just as destructive to health.

A growing body of evidence links noise to elevated blood pressure, myocardial infarction, loss of sleep, changes in brain chemistry and other maladies – not to mention hearing loss. According to the World Health Organization, these health effects “can lead to social handicap, reduced productivity, decreased performance in learning, absenteeism in the workplace and school, increased drug use, and accidents.”

Common sense is another casualty. As more of us live in smaller spaces, the dome of technology-produced noise smothers our sense of proportion.

Years ago, few people (other than the occasional neighbor yelling, “Get off the lawn!”) would have thought to crack down on the normal, healthy noises of life. Today, witness all those community associations that disallow basketball hoops and other forms of traditional play.

Make no mistake, some people will use any poor excuse to make noise. “Honk if Pluto is still a planet,” states a new bumper sticker. At least on Pluto there are no boom cars to rattle your intestines, no people using their car horns as doorbells or their motorcycles as testosterone gauges. And no space ports. Yet.

“I lived in the Lindbergh flight path for most of my life and finally moved completely out of both take-off and landing,” says Vonn Marie May, a cultural land planner and preservationist who now lives in Encinitas. “It's taken more than a year to exorcize the airplane 'clock' that was instilled in me. A year later I would still wake up around 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. (breaches of curfew landing times that persist in Point Loma).”

Now she struggles with road noise. “I live over two miles east of I-5, and can easily hear the freeway din in the morning. With a simple redesign, the cumulative noise could be reduced by half,” she says, pointing to all the sound walls going up to protect the market value of neighborhoods.

On the freeway, runway or lawn, design is destiny.

The average life of mowers and trimmers is seven years. “By 2012, most of today's stock will be in the recycle heap,” according to the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse. “There is a tremendous opportunity over the coming years to dramatically reshape our neighborhood soundscapes by reshaping the lawn and garden marketplace.”

Coming soon: affordable hybrid gas-and-electric riding mowers. “If everyone in your neighborhood was mowing at the same time with a quiet electric mower, it would probably be quieter than if just one person in your neighborhood was using a typical gas-powered mower,” according to NPC.

Similarly, road noise could be reduced through wider use of hybrid-engine autos, which represent the first significant reduction in car noise in decades.

Jets are already quieter, at least the larger commercial variety. Now researchers at Ohio State University have developed an even better silencer technology using electrical arcs to control turbulence in engine airflow, the main producer of engine noise.

The trouble is, brains will be more difficult to replace; and technological advances are seldom matched to political action. Anti-noise campaigns around the country tend to focus on regulation, though enforcement of existing noise-damping laws is generally lax.

The California leaf blower and mower swap programs suggest a better strategy: government encouragement of better technology, combined with muscular trade-in programs for citizens and business; a planet-wide campaign to replace all existing trimmers, blowers, autos, planes and other machines with clean, quiet machines by 2030.

In the meantime, don't honk if you love Pluto.