Ready to transition away from using gas leaf blowers? Here are some alternatives.

Go electric! Use a battery-powered or corded electric blower. Some blowers can be used as vacuums that chop the leaves as they are sucked up. You can bag the chopped-up leaves, put them on your compost pile, or use them as mulch in your garden.

Use a rake or broom. This is especially effective for cleaning  up grass clippings and lightweight debris. And bonus: it’s good exercise!

Leave the leaves and grass clippings to enrich your lawn.  More information on sustainable lawn care and “leaving the leaves” is here in this Green Acton article.

If you hire a landscaping service, request that staff do not use gas leaf blowers, especially during the summer months, when there is far less debris to clean up.

Landscapers may tell you that it is not cost effective or even possible to use battery-powered leaf blowers. Here is testimony from a landscaping company, and a detailed PDF below that, to disprove both those claims.

Thank you. Good afternoon, my name is Nancy Sainburg, and I’m the owner of the Enchanted Garden, a landscaping company located here in DC. We’ve been in business for over 30 years, and a majority of our business is in DC. We provide services to clients with properties as small as townhouses, and as large as several acres. Both commercial and residential properties. 
You may hear some testimony today that it is not possible for landscape professionals to do our job without gas-powered blowers. But I can tell you from my own experience that that is completely untrue. We’ve been using only battery-operated blowers for the past two years, and have had no trouble keeping up with the work in a timely manner. We’ve had no complaints from clients that our services are taking more time, and have heard nothing but compliments on low noise levels from the battery blowers. 

My epiphany regarding the switch from gas blowers to battery blowers occurred two years ago. I was out walking my dog, and I heard a leaf blower. When I got closer to the noise, I realized that it was my own landscape crew, who were finishing up an installation in my neighborhood. I had heard it from over two blocks away. That was it for me. The noise pollution was just too much. I went out the next week and bought a battery-operated blower to see how well it worked. The initial reaction from my crew was, “Okay, we’ll give this toy a try.” But pretty soon they were favoring the battery-powered blowers over the gas blowers. The following spring season, we switched to all battery-powered equipment. The crew asked if we could keep one gas blower for the fall leaf season, and I decided to see what would happen. Once the fall season came, no one even once mentioned using the gas blower. The people who worked with this equipment every day have said that they enjoy using it much more than the gas equipment. They’re not subjected to high noise levels, and they don’t have headaches at the end of the day, which was often a complaint. 
Thank you. 

From Quiet Clean DC: Testimony at DC Leaf Blower Hearings on July 2, 2018.

Please click on the image below to open a PDF file with a lot of information on the costs of battery leaf blowers versus gas leaf blowers