What about lawn mowers, snow blowers or chain saws?

Or string trimmers or lawn aerators or any other motorized items one might use in their yard?

The answer: None of them send toxic pesticides and herbicides onto/into neighbor's property so effectively.




This is a silly question to even address but it comes up so frequently as a "straw man" argument that we may as well address it.

Leaf blowers were originally designed to spread pesticides and herbicides. (Whether first used in the US or Japan is apparently up for debate, but not the intended use.) No other tool sends plumes of toxic dust into the air.

Mowers either collect the grass and any pesticides/herbicides in a bag, put them right back onto the lawn or shoot them to the side at a downward angle. 


Snow blowers, though regularly raised as a straw man, obviously have nothing to do with this question unless you are using it to blow soil from your lawn. 


If you're using a chain saw to slice through the soil of your yard then you may have other issues to attend to.


Do these all these tools make noise? Yes - but please note the title of this blog ("It's not about the noise.") Do they all put pollutants into the air? One way or another, yes (even electric tools have emissions somewhere) but that's not the focus of the author's health concerns surrounding leaf blowers. 


There is only one yard tool that effectively raises toxic dust and spreads it from one place to another: leaf blowers.