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It's hard to appreciate the quiet tranquility of your backyard, garden, or patio with the high-pitched whine of petroleum-powered lawn mowers, leaf blowers, trimmers, and chain saws roaring in the background.

The right landscaping tools can significantly reduce air, water, soil, and noise pollution. Stop and smell the roses instead of the gas fumes. Skip the power tools and choose hand tools instead. If your landscaping job can't be done with people-powered tools, choose electric power tools over gas. Save water by using an outdoor broom and a little elbow grease rather than a hose to clean your driveway. Likewise, choose an efficient watering system for your landscape.

Find it! Eco-friendly landscaping tools

How to choose eco-friendly landscaping tools

While organic gardening, lawn care, and landscaping are becoming mainstream, eco-friendly outdoor tools have some catching up to do. Many tools are made with flimsy, polluting plastics and have to be replaced after just a couple of seasons. That said, there are some good choices out there. Here are a few general tips for choosing eco-friendly landscaping tools:

• Choose hand tools whenever possible. They're the least polluting, and you get a little exercise to boot.
• If you do go with power landscaping tools, choose electric rather than petroleum-powered models: they'll cause less air, water, soil, and noise pollution.[1]
• Select tools that use recycled materials in their manufacture.
• Avoid tools containing new plastic. If you must choose plastic, make it recycled.
• Use an outdoor broom to sweep driveways, sidewalks, and steps rather than hosing them down.[2] Using a hose can consume up to 50 gallons of water every five minutes.[3]
• Rather than buying new landscaping tools, why not consider buying secondhand? Hand and power tools are popular items at yard sales, flea markets, and estate sales, as well as on online exchange forums such as FreeCycle and craigslist.
• Consider buying reconditioned tools. This eliminates the ecological costs of materials and manufacturing for a new tool, and keeps more tools out of the landfill.
• If your property is large and the idea of maintaining it with hand tools is too daunting, consider hiring a landscaping service rather than buying all those power tools.
• For an expensive piece of machinery that you won't use often, such as a chipper, consider renting one, perhaps splitting the cost with the neighbors. Sharing tools saves on the ecological costs of manufacturing.[1]

Hand tools

Many landscaping tasks can be accomplished easily and efficiently with hand tools like shovels, rakes, hand trowels, pruning shears, and saws. Here are some tips for getting the most out of your hand tools:

• Buy the best hand tools you can afford and keep them well maintained. Keep tools under cover, sharpened, cleaned, and oiled as needed.[4] Good hand tools can last for generations if properly cared for. Hardwood handles, stainless steel, and aluminum are good choices. Bamboo is a popular material for leaf rakes. Unfortunately, in the US, the wood used to manufacture handles for hand tools isn't usually certified as being sustainably harvested.[5]
• Consider an interchangeable tool system. A set of tools that share one handle uses fewer materials in its manufacture. Plus, if one component breaks, just that piece can be replaced, rather than buying a whole new tool.[6]
• Apply a small amount of boiled linseed oil to the wooden handles of your tools once in a while: It keeps them from drying out and cracking, and they'll last longer.[7]
• Oil moving parts with a petroleum-free alternative.
• Sharpen a dull blade rather then replacing the whole tool. Here's how.
• Replace a broken handle rather than throwing out the tool. Buy a new handle and learn how to replace it to give your hand tool a longer life.
• Keep tools clean and rust-free by storing them in a bucket of sand with a little vegetable oil added.[8]

Power tools

There's no question about it: power landscaping tools can often get a large job done more quickly, with less work. If you do decide to buy power landscaping tools, choose electric. Electric tools produce less pollution than those powered by gasoline engines. For example, electric engines are 50 to 70 percent quieter than gas powered leaf blowers and emit no air pollution.[9] Keep in mind, however, that while electrically powered landscaping tools produce virtually no pollution from exhaust emissions or fuel evaporation, the power to run them does create pollution.[10]

If you're thinking about buying electric tools, here are some things to consider:

• If your yard requires power tools to maintain, consider a more natural landscape with less lawn and more native plantings. It'll not only save you work, it's better for the environment, especially for wildlife.
• Use landscaping methods that minimize the use of power tools. For example, instead of using a gas-powered leaf blower, use a mulching mower to keep fine grass clippings and shredded leaves on your lawn, providing a natural fertilizer. Let hedges grow naturally, rather than shaping them with an electric hedge trimmer.
• Vacuum up lawn debris with an electric leaf "blower." Many blowers can also act as vacuums so you're not just blowing your leaves into someone else's yard. Vacuuming instead of blowing doesn't stir up harmful particulate matter. (See Related health issues).
• Use a lawn sweeper. These whisper-quiet, pollution-free alternatives to gas-powered leaf blowers look like reel-mowers and act like carpet sweepers: collecting leaves, grass clippings, twigs, and other yard debris without sending harmful particulate matter into the air.[9]
• Use a hand saw. Unless you heat with a woodstove, you don't really need a chain saw: a pruning saw, bow saw, or buck saw can take care of most wood-cutting needs. If you live in an area where hurricanes and high winds make fallen trees a regular occurrence, have a neighbor who uses a woodstove do your wood-cutting in exchange for the wood, or hire a tree service.
• Rent or borrow power tools for infrequent needs. Save the ecological cost of manufacturing a tool that will just take up space in your garage or garden shed.

Eco-friendly landscaping tools help you go green because…

• They don't use oil or gasoline, which pollute the air, water, and soil.
• They don't produce noise pollution which can damage hearing and contribute to other health problems.
• They save water.

Small engines, big problems

Small engines produce big emissions. Lawn mowers, leaf vacuums, snow blowers, chain saws, and other outdoor power equipment are a major source of pollution. They produce high levels of carbon monoxide, and also emit ozone-forming hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides. Ground-level ozone is a triple threat: it impairs lung function, it stunts plant growth, and it's one of the main components of smog.[10] In one hour, a gasoline-powered leaf blower produces the same amount of emissions as a car traveling more than 350 miles. The EPA estimates that gasoline-powered landscape equipment, including mowers, trimmers, blowers, and chain saws, causes more than 5 percent of urban air pollution.[11]

Upcoming regulations

Until now, small engines have taken a back seat to automotive engines when it comes to emissions regulation. In April 2007, the EPA proposed an emission control program to cut hydrocarbon emissions from small spark-ignition engines by about 35 percent. These standards are expected go into effect in 2011 or 2012, depending on the size of the engine. Included in the standards are spark-ignition nonroad engines rated below 25 horsepower—both household and commercial—including lawn and garden equipment. The EPA believes these engines and vehicles are significant contributors to air pollution, making up about 25 percent of hydrocarbon emissions and 30 percent of carbon monoxide emissions from mobile sources.[12]

Two-strokes, two problems

Why do these small engines produce so much pollution? Petroleum-powered lawn and garden machines have two-stroke engines that use fuel, which is a mixture of gasoline and special two-stroke engine oil—about 4 ounces of oil are added for each gallon of gas. If cars had two-stroke engines, they'd burn about a gallon of oil every thousand miles. Two-stroke engines pollute more than four-stroke (automobile) engines for two reasons: One is the oil combustion, which makes all two-stroke engines somewhat smoky. Secondly, each time the air/fuel mix enters the combustion chamber, some of it leaks out through the exhaust port. You can't see it with a leaf blower like you can in the water around a two-stroke boat motor, but it's still there. This is a toxic combination for the environment.[13]

Related health issues

California’s Air Resources Board found that the two-stroke engines spew several pounds of particulate matter into the air for every hour of use. Not only do leaf blowers produce pollution, they also stir up harmful ground-level substances and cause them to become airborne. Pollen, feces, and other dust particles, as well as dangerous substances like lead, organic carbon, chromium, arsenic, cadmium, nickel, and mercury—which accumulate along street curbs—are blown into the air where they are inhaled by pedestrians.[9]

Who's at risk

The excessive carbon monoxide emitted by gas-powered landscaping tools is especially harmful to pregnant women, fetuses, young infants, the elderly, anemics, and people who suffer from certain blood, cardiovascular, or respiratory diseases. For particulate matter, the biggest risk groups are the elderly and people afflicted with asthma, angina, pneumonia, or other lung and heart ailments. Also at risk are blower operators and those who exercise outdoors.[14]

Can you hear me now?

Leaf blowers can also damage your hearing. The majority of leaf blowers operate at noise levels of 70 to 75 decibels, about 100 times the level to which health experts say the human ear can be safely subjected.[9]

Because of the associated air pollution, noise pollution, and health risks of leaf blowers, their use is against the law in 20 major California cities.[15] Some cities, such as Cambridge, Massachusetts, while not outlawing leaf blowers altogether, have enacted ordinances limiting their use.[16]

Tax breaks and subsidies

California's South Coast Air Quality Management District was first in the nation to offer a leaf blower exchange program. Aimed at professional landscapers, the program allows those who bring in their polluting two-stroke leaf blowers to trade them in for cleaner-running 4-stroke models (for an additional fee). The four-stroke models are about five times cleaner than older two-stroke leaf blowers, but at 65 decibels, the blowers are still "about as noisy as a busy street or a small orchestra."[17][18]

External links

• Citizens for a Quieter Sacramento - Leaf Blower Facts Read about how the citizens of one city are taking up their rakes in the crusade to ban leaf blowers. Included are studies on the environmental effects of the air pollution caused by leaf blowers and the health effects of noise pollution caused by them.
• National Resources Defense Council - Particulate Pollution Find out about the health effects of particulate air pollution: what particulate matter is, who's at greatest risk, how these particles harm your health, and what you can do to help.