||| FROM THE COLORADO SUN ||| Reprint at request of Orcasonian reader
Standing on a leaf-strewn lawn at Sloan’s Lake Park early on a sunny December day, Jordan Champalou says cutting ozone by switching to cleaner engines is as easy as pressing a button.
And then he presses the button.
One of the battery-powered leaf blowers he employs in his lawn care business hums immediately to life. The array of lawn tools, from mowers to chain saws, spread in front of Champalou are just as powerful on batteries as any gas-powered equipment his competitors use, he says. None of the tools’ motors need any maintenance beyond recharging.
Speaking of recharging, he adds, when he’s on the road doing lawns all day, he pops the batteries into chargers that are connected to solar panels. Solar panels that he’s taped to the roof of his pickup truck.
“I still have power at the end of the day,” grins Champalou, who says people stop him every day to talk about electric lawn tools and how they stack up against dirtier gas-powered models. “It’s never run dry.”
Environmental advocates were happy to stand quietly in the Sloan Lake sunshine and let flannel-bedecked Champalou make their best arguments. The clean electric lawn display is part of an environmental sprint before Dec. 13 to get the Colorado Air Quality Control Commission to reject state air pollution officials’ ozone-fighting plan and write a tougher one.
Champalou, 21, who maintains lawns around Westminster, said he first went electric at age 10 when he knocked on neighbors’ doors trying to make a buck.
“I did not want to smell like gasoline, and I did not want to be breathing those fumes,” he said. He’s adamant that much of the blue collar machine world can switch over to clean running electric tools with no compromise on performance.
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I have been using a battery-powered lawnmower, chainsaw, leaf vac, weed whacker, and rototiller for about 9 years. So nice – quiet, clean, no fuel mix, no oily taste in the mouth. Greenworks and Stihl have a nice selection of options. Stihl is available at Orcas Rental and Saw. Here’s a video showing the tools in action: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=314963246304772
It would be hard to come up with a dumber and more annoying waste of resources than a leaf blower. Battery powered is clearly more pleasant for the users and has a less obvious carbon footprint but where do you think the electricity comes from? Electricity transmits energy, it isn’t a source! And what do you think all the plastic parts are made from? And what was the energy source to smelt the steel for all the components inside the leaf blower? Where and how were the lithium and other exotic metals mined, refined and smelted?
What is wrong with leaving the leaves to decay and return those nutrients to the soil that they came from? And if you really can’t stand the natural process, USE A RAKE! They have worked just fine for thousands of years, produce no toxic exhaust, gets you a little light exercise and doesn’t make a racket.
Orcas, let’s just ban them now, we don’t need to recreate the wheel.
Before returning to Orcas, I watched my former community disintegrate with the deadly combination of entitlement, privilege, greed, gentrification-common elements of disconnection -the symptoms being things like speeding through quiet neighborhoods, not stopping at stop signs, (see my video on youtube: https://youtu.be/8Il-a-oDJDw) not complying with leaf blower ordinances, constant litter, and all kinds of other things that eroded the fabric and safety of so called safe neighborhoods.
The writing was on the wall. Eventually people got run down and killed in crosswalks in 25 mile an hour zones bc drivers were on their phones, clueless, careless, disconnected. Our songbirds and beneficial insects disappeared in the dawn to dusk dust of leaf blowers. Our little bit of wildlife was left dead in the road due to distracted drivers. I started petitions, went to meetings, offered to buy rakes AND rake for people, mobilized a lot of others, not because I was focusing on leaf blowers but because I could see this issue was the spot on the skin that indicated a much bigger cancer. Now, in that county finally, 20 years after getting leaf blower ordinances in place (but enforcing them) the gas-powered blowers are banned 20 Years!
It’s all connected. We aren’t immune. Look at our local sheriff’s report-every week people are ticket for doing 50 or 60 mph in a 35 zone.
Orcas let’s do it now. We are a small enough community to write our own narrative and shorten some scenes.
Leaf blowers are a menace to society. Last year, we went to the Lake Quinault Lodge for a peaceful weekend. That was shattered by the leaf blowers being used in the parking lot, just outside our door. Nothing the staff could do about it. A few weeks ago, we attended my nephew’s wedding and stayed in a hotel on Staten Island. It was very quiet, until the leaf blowers started at 7:30 in the morning. Nothing the hotel employees could do about it. We stayed over a couple of nights at our friends apartment in Manhattan, on the 5th floor, overlooking Central Park West. It’s not generally quiet, but whatever moments might have been appreciated as relatively quiet were blasted out by the leaf blowers in their courtyard. The traffic wasn’t nearly as noisy as the leaf blowers, which start and stop and start and stop, revving up again every time they’re restarted, every few seconds. I thought, well, I’m just too sensitive. But I’m finding out that others find leaf blowers a huge, unnecessary annoyance. Don’t we have enough noise in our noisy world without them?
What could be dumber than a leaf blower? Rake the refuse – get some exercise while you’re at it – bin the refuse (like cigarette butts and litter) in the trash and put the organic matter in the compost or on your garden beds. Simple! – and best of all, no noise or gas fumes or dust. If you have ever seen landscape companies using leaf blowers in the summer, you will know what i mean about swirling dirt and dust.