Note that the above is not talking about CO2. Pollutants other than CO2 are typically heavily regulated for on-road vehicles and power generation, and they have expensive systems that prevent a very significant amount of those pollutants from being emitted.
For example, your cars catalyst prevents a lot of pollutants from being emitted -- but your lawnmower doesn't have this device at all.
CO2 is a different story all together -- because it's the primary byproduct.
"The 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," said Jason Kavanagh, Engineering Editor at Edmunds.com. "As ridiculous as it may sound, it is more 'green' to ditch your yard equipment and find a way to blow leaves using a Raptor."
"The tests found that a Ryobi 4-stroke leaf blower kicked out almost seven times more oxides of nitrogen (NOx) and 13.5 times more carbon monoxide (CO) than the Raptor, which InsideLine.com once dubbed "the ultimate Michigan mudslinger." An Echo 2-stroke leaf blower performed even worse, generating 23 times CO and nearly 300 times more non-methane hydrocarbons (NMHC) than the Raptor. "
10% does seem mind bogglingly high, but then when you consider just how big the efficiency gap is, and start thinking about how many people have leaf blowers, weed whackers and the like... maybe it's possible?
I don't know about the 10% figure, but regardless of whether you pick numbers from the high or low end of the range of estimates, the impact of lawn equipment is still staggering. 4 cycle engines make a huge difference, as do things like catalytic converters and scrubbers. 2-stroke engines, on the other hand, are both a horribly inefficient design to begin with, and also typically come fitted with absolutely no pollution controls.
Also, it's not just leaf blowers. It's also lawn mowers and other gas powered lawn equipment.
The IC engines used for lawn tools have significant weight and cost constraints and less regulation compared to the IC engines used in transportation which makes them much more polluting. Similarly, motorcycle engines are more polluting than car engines by an order of magnitude.
Can you provide data on motorcycle engines? I do believe this to be true for 2-strokes and older motorcycles, but for modern Euro-4/5 regulated street motorcycles I very much doubt it.
Carbon emission has an almost direct relationship to the amount of fuel burned, so assuming single occupancy, even older motorcycles do fair better than most cars in that respect.
Particulate and NOX emission, not so much.
Bikes didn't require catalysts for a long time. And they often used less-precise fueling systems, like carburetors. But that has changed or is changing in a lot of places more recently.
Practically this incorrect. When a car is in single or double occupancy (which is majority of cases) it will pollute more than a motorcycle one. Yes, a filled bus or car might be more efficient, but the average utilization on an auto is very low since most people drive them alone.
You might be talking CO2 emissions where a car emits more than a bike.
Pollution is a different matter though. Even the big 4-stroke tourers have worse emission control than cars; the 2-stroke motorbikes are exponentially worse in SOx/NOx/CO/particulate emissions (which hurt your lungs rather than the climate).
The two stroke engines they use are terrible. I mean you mix oil into the fuel so it just burns off. No surprise that it's polluting disproportionately.
Emissions controls for cars, and semi-trucks started becoming a thing in the mid 1970s, and standards have got stronger over the years. There are a few collector cars around, but for the most part anything in actually use is pretty clean, emitting CO2 and H2O. (Of course CO2 has issues, but short term nothing nearly as harmful as what small engines produce)
Small airplanes have not kept up (they still use lead fuel!), and so are overall worse than lawn equipment. However there is a lot more lawn equipment. (I don't know anything about modern jet engine emissions)
Lawn equipment tends to have proportionally huge non-CO2 pollutant emissions because they are meant to be portable and thus have been exempted from emission standards. From what I've read, it seems like lawn equipment manufacturers do not consider pollution as a parameter when designing their equipment.
Electric lawn equipment has only become viable in the market in the past decade or so due to improved batteries. Now that electrification is feasible (and often nicer to use than gas-powered), seems great to ban or at least disincentivize combustion engine equipment.
In 2011, approximately 26.7 million tons of pollutants were emitted by GLGE (VOC=461,800; CO=5,793,200; NOx=68,500, PM10=20,700; CO2=20,382,400), accounting for 24%−45% of all nonroad gasoline emissions. Gasoline-powered landscape maintenance equipment (GLME; leaf blowers/vacuums, and trimmers, edgers, brush cutters) accounted for 43% of VOCs and around 50% of fine PM. Two-stroke engines were responsible for the vast majority of fine PM from GLME.
Cars and Trucks have catalytic converters for a reason. If we were serious about this we would have mandated the same for lawn equipment (at serious expense mind you).
Now I think everybody is quietly waiting for the revolution of battery powered lawn equipment to make this moot.
The revolution is already here. I had gas powered weedwackers as a kid. Nowadays I own an 18v brushless Makita. It's fantastic, almost as powerful as the gas one was...and they also make 36v and 80v versions that are beyond powerful enough for any job.
I own a mix. I absolutely love my electric leaf blower and electric chainsaw. But I own both an electric and a gas-powered string trimmer. The electric one is every bit as powerful as the gas one, and it's much nicer to use. But it doesn't have the runtime to do the large steep slope further away from the house. For the big jobs I tend to dual-wield, using a blade on one and a string on the other. If I hadn't inherited the gas-powered one, I'd probably just have more batteries for the electric one.
Those higher voltage weedwackers are very impressive. I've used one that was somewhere north of 40v, and it was closer to a brush-cutter than a weedwacker. I had to turn it down to a lower setting to prevent damaging the things I was trimming around.
The revolution is obviously coming. The big manufactures probably support this as it will force their customers to replace working equipment with their new battery lines.
Oh yeah, it's already here. The money to be made is huge. Used to be you'd go buy a Honda mower and it would run with practically zero maintenance for 20 years or more. Now you go get a cordless mower and replace batteries every two or three years, and the whole thing becomes obsolete pretty quickly. It's a lucrative market.
Gas mowers are definitely not zero maintenance, at least not past 10 years. I've replaced my fair share of gaskets & spark plugs, cleaned out intakes, and spent 20m screwing with the choke to get the damn things started.
I went pure electric 5 years ago with no problems. Starts up every time with the push of a button and since I bought a set, it came with multiple batteries so I can swap them out before fully depleting one for extended life.
I guess everyone has a different experience, then. I made a sport out of trying to kill an old Briggs & Stratton lawn mower by doing no maintenance at all. Running old gas, never changing the oil or anything else, just didn't care. It wouldn't die. Well, except for the self-propelled part, that was always a nuisance. But the engine was indestructible [0]. I finally retired it after 20 years due to rust, but the engine was still going fine.
I have my share of electric battery-powered lawn equipment, but I've already gone through one generation of batteries which rendered the old equipment obsolete. And the markup on batteries is on the order of 500% compared to what a generic battery of similar chemistry would cost. It's an excellent racket, very profitable.
I wonder about the people here on HN buying Ryobi stuff... maybe they're onto something. Normally I wouldn't touch Ryobi with a ten foot pole, because it's trash. But OTOH, it's cheap, so maybe the quality of the tool will match up with the expected availability of batteries so the TCO isn't as offensive.
[0] If you haven't seen those old videos where B&S demonstrates why the Slick 50 demos were BS, you should. Lawnmower engines are way overbuilt, mostly as an artifact of their small size. They're hard to kill.
Ethanol in gas has had a seriously deleterious effect on lawn equipment. So many carbs full of gooey nasty rubber residue. My local Home Depot has started carrying cans of ethanol free gasoline because there are literally no gas stations in the county that carry it anymore.
It's bad when you're looking at some piece of equipment and are relieved to discover that it has been sitting with gas in it since the 90s. At least there is a hope the rubber bits are intact.
On the other hand, this is so common now that the aftermarket carb business has become a mass market. You can buy chinese knockoffs carbs with all of the hoses and plastic bits for like $10 on Amazon now.
That isn't ethanol. That is the cheaper grade of gas they use with ethanol rotting faster. (Ethanol is high octane, you cannot use the same molecules in non-ethanol gas as you can in ethanol) So yes, ethanol free gas lasts longer, but it isn't because it is ethanol free, it is because the gas is better quality.
Aftermarket carbs are cheap because carbs are cheap. You can buy a lawn mower at WalMart for $100, and everyone has to make a profit. That means the engine can't cost more than $20, and the carb must be less than that. The Chinese make a nice profit selling new carbs for $10, even though most carbs still go to the engine manufactures who pay a lot less in quantity.
Ethanol has been common enough in gas since the 90s.In the early years there were problems with it attacking rubber. That rubber hasn't been used in fuel systems for years though.
Closest one to me according to pure-gas.org is about an hour away, a couple of counties over. There are literally none in the county. I don't know if that's local law or market forces in action.
I recall reading somewhere a gas powered leaf blower emits as much CO pollution in 15 minutes as a full sized SUV does over a 1000 mile cross country trip. They are insanely dirty in comparison.
As others have pointed out, not CO2 but other pollutants, mainly. Because of 2 stroke engines. They literally throw oil particles into the air, and burn oil mixed in with the gas. Lightweight, mechanically simple, and variable torque, but absolutely environmentally awful. And noisy.
Most gas-powered leaf blowers and trimmers have 2-cycle engines where you mix the oil and fuel together and pretty much directly exhaust the combustion. Can't be good to burn that stuff...
They are extremely wasteful. Auto manufacturers are always improving emissions on their engines but thats not the case in lawn equipment. Passenger flights and leaf blowers are two largely western luxuries that are absolutely horrible for our environment.
Yeah it seems nonsensical. My 2-stroke lawnmower burns maybe a pint of fuel three or four times a month or so. My car burns gallons a day. Granted the car exhaust is cleaner, but it's so much more total hydrocarbon burned.
Even 10% nationally? Including every semi truck, car and airplane? And then all of our national power generation system?
It doesn't seem like blowers could be 10% of that no matter how you slice it.