Or new brooms. Or new rakes for that matter.
nbh wrote in All Your Carbon are Belong to Everyone:
Hey, don’t go hating on the leaf blowers. What about the elctric ones?
I’m not sure if electric leaf blowers are more or less energy-efficient than gas-powered ones. But both certainly leave more of a carbon footprint than using a broom or rake.
I have nothing against labor-saving devices. But with all the labor-saving devices we have, this country sure is filled with a lot of out-of-shape people who don’t have a lot of free time. We take home work to do at night and on the weekends, rush from activitiy to activity, spend tons of money on health club memberships and diet aids, and yet have high rates of heart disease and diabetes.
I appreciate the neighbor next door who cleans up the sidewalk after mowing his yard; he uses a leaf-blower to blow the clippings back onto his lawn. Aesthetically, it’s nicer than the guy across the street who leaves mounds of clippings all over the place. The grass clippings in the street get washed down into the gutter, which I’m sure the city appreciates as there is a problem with flooding in the lower-lying streets in the neighborhood.
But what’s so hard about using a broom or a rake? I can understand wanting to make your life a little easier in the autumn when there are boatloads of leaves to deal with. But for a few cups’ worth of grass clippings? The guy next door also uses their snowblower after a fluffy 2-3″ of the white stuff comes down. I don’t think he has any physical problems; he is often out shooting hoops with his son.
A former co-worker and her husband have a lawn service, a snow removal service, and health club memberships, but she always complains about getting fat. True, mowing grass and shoveling snow don’t count as cardio workouts (not unless you do them for 20 minute-periods, three times a week). But every day activities can certainly help burn off calories.
Lawn services use a lot of motorized devices. You see guys marching around, blowers harnessed to their backs, cleaning up after mowing or gathering leaves. It’s a lot cheaper for the companies to have their workers use blowers than to use brooms and rakes; labor is the highest expense for businesses.
Once people spend money on something like a leaf blower or a snowblower they want to use it a lot in order to get their money’s worth out of it. It’s like people who “complain” about watching too much tv, but then rationalize that they spend some much on cable service that they might as well get their money’s worth out of it.
We have a lawnmower (gas-powered, a Craftsman machine that is going on 16 years now — fine made-in-America craftsmanship!), so it’s not like we’re motorized equipment innocents. We also have a weedwhacker (electric; I think it’s a Crafstman), but only because my father bought it for us; I hate using it — it scare the heck out of me. The washing machine and dryer (Kenmore, electric-powered; also going on 16 years) also make our lives easier, although most of the time we hang the laundry to dry and use the dryer for heavy things like blankets and towels. The other next door neighbors hang their laundry outside (props to them for that!), which is quite daring as there are a lot of birds flying about. They even have a birdfeeder; we have one, too, and so hang the laundry in the basement.
I don’t expect people to go Luddite, discard all modern contraptions, and live off the land. (Unless they want to.) Just aim for moderation or balance. Use a broom once in a while. Perhaps if they were marketed as “upper body workout tools” that would spur use.
