> There is also a new restriction for battery-powered models. They may only be used from October to December.
If you want to live in nature and in a city you need the tools to manage it. Cutting the trees down is also a valid solution.
It's the classic arsehole world we have become, people have to be indignant about everything.
For the people who don't create, lazy sloths sitting in their basements, they lash out at those who do.
Trees are a lot of work, when you work in gardening half the time is cleaning (leaf blowing, hedging and mowing) the other half is chopping them down because they are too much work for the owner.
People managed to keep trees in cities just fine prior to the mid 20th century so I can't imagine it's an insurmountable obstacle. Beyond cutting the trees down, other valid solutions include (but are not limited to) letting the leaves be on the ground by the tree, using a rake, planting tree species with smaller leaves, or allowing the leaves to be picked up by the regular street cleaning trucks.
Trees are really only a lot of work if you insist on keeping a grotesquely unnatural manicured garden; the only tree I've got that's any significant amount work is an apple tree that would turn half the yard to a rotten apple tripping hazard if you didn't pick them up. A couple more need trimming every few years to keep a path clear, but I would chalk that up to user error in choosing to plant them slightly too close to the path.
Contrary to what the "just tough it out" types would have you believe, noise pollution does cause appreciable harm to public health. Making lots of noise in a dense neighborhood where thousands of people live is just not worth the marginal efficiency improvement of blowing vs raking leaves. Tangentially, this is also one of several reasons why speed limits should be 30km/h in cities to limit rolling noise.
You don't need a leaf blower to collect up the leaves in a reasonable time.
We've managed to maintain cities with trees for hundreds of years without leaf blowers, and have owned one I can confirm that it cuts maybe 20% of the time over simply using a rake.
Maybe if you're just doing your own back garden and it's just leaf matter. But for professional arborists / municipal arboricultural teams, a leaf blower - specifically a backpack blower (battery / alkalyte | petrol) speeds up clean up by orders of magnitude.
I could understand the ban for residential use, fine - I agree just using a rake if it is just leaves, but for tree work / hedge work where the owner expects "tidy" as one of the things they see at the end of the job they're essential. Without then It'd mean an extra couple of hours on every job, which means less jobs, which means higher costs. The fine chips, the hedge cuttings and the tiny snapped twigs they take ages to clear up. Especially on gravel or grass. Fast moving air is the perfect tool for cleaning up this stuff on all surfaces.
All that being said, it is actually better to leave material for habitat and detritivores. It's really valuable, so in that regard it may force peoples hands in "accepting the mess" or as I like to say "the reconfigured habitat".
It'll boil down to "the cost", "the mess" or "the noise".
context: I'm an arborist as well as a software engineer.
And, IIRC, seems like some places are actually leaving the leafs in the gardens instead of cleaning them, and seems to be beneficial for wildlife and soil.
I find the the historic argument to be not so great, when trying to argue the current state of the world. In the 1950s we "managed" 5% child mortality rate (in developed countries). Trees are not kids, but the point is: If something has not changed for a few decades, that's probably something you would want to look at and see what can be improved.
Granted though, leaf blowers ain't it. We are way too lenient regarding noise pollution.
I don't get why you're so upset. Zurich gardeners can still use leaf blowers when leaves are falling, which is between October and December. Only they need to be electric.
The reason is not only environmental, also many people (including myself) were unhappy with the noise of the petrol powered ones. They are very loud, and it seems the typical Zurich neighbor always decides to clean up his garden on a Saturday morning at 7AM.
It is, if anything, anti-functional: unless it smothers everything the litter provides nitrogen and nutrients as it decomposes.
Getting rid of all the litter for that “perfect lawn” requires re-introducing nitrogen artificially (historically lawns would be grown with clover, the clover being a nitrogen fixer for the grass, that stopped being a thing when people started widely applying broad-leaf herbicides like 2,4D, the lawn industry then labelled clover a weed to make killing it a goal rather than a negative side effect).
100%, like cutting grass, all the stuff you cut and move out of your lawn is nutrients leaving your soil, do that long enough and you'll get dead soil, then you'll need to buy compost... which is made from the leaves, grass cuts and bio trash that you city charges you to collect. It's a perfect cycle really.
> the lawn industry then labelled clover a weed to make killing it a goal rather than a negative side effect
People who are into bio gardening/farming use cover crops to boost soil fertility and avoid weeds, very often clovers actually. You can even use them as cover crops while growing other things, again to compete with weeds, every know and then you cut them down, leave them on the spot, they decompose and feed your crops/earthworms
When we bought our house about 7 years ago, the lawn was in terrible shape. I’m not a huge fan of lawns—-I’ve been slowly converting it to a garden—-but my wife likes one. Instead of going chemlawn like many of our neighbors, instead we started planting clover. This horrified my father in law, who spends inordinate amounts of time removing clover and dandelions from his lawn. Anyway, after years of planting clover and the occasional overseeding with grass seed in the fall, our lawn now looks very nice. And it stays nice even during drought (like right now). We also just mulch all the fallen leaves with a mulching blade on our lawnmower. So much easier than picking up the leaves, and you can barely tell that I did not rake them. Admittedly the lawn is not 100% grass, but who cares? This is not a golf course.
Before the spread of broad-leaf herbicides and fertilisers it was just normal, you’d get clover mix at the grower or lawn care shop or your lawn seeds would come with some amount of clover mixed in.
They blow them into piles on their own property or collect them in bags and send them to compost.
Not everyone, sure, but this isn't an issue of rakes Vs leaf-blowers and it isn't the problem with two-stroke leaf blowers.
If anything, people with leaf blowers probably put more thought into what they do with their leaves, because they have a bigger volume of them to deal with.
We had weekly leaf blowing outside our office regardless if it was raining or not by the management staff of other buildings. If you don't pick up what you blew away what is the point? It got really out of hand.
This wasn't the city, they were blowing the leaves into the street making that issue worse. The city uses other equipment to clean the roads, drains etc.
If you want to live in nature and in a city you need the tools to manage it. Cutting the trees down is also a valid solution.
It's the classic arsehole world we have become, people have to be indignant about everything.
For the people who don't create, lazy sloths sitting in their basements, they lash out at those who do.
Trees are a lot of work, when you work in gardening half the time is cleaning (leaf blowing, hedging and mowing) the other half is chopping them down because they are too much work for the owner.