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Comment by yabones | Hacker News Reader

This is a good thing. It might inconvenience some old suburban men that have no hobbies other than making their lawn look like astroturf, but those of us that breathe air regularly should be asking for this in their own jurisdiction.

Unlike your car, a four-stroke engine with a catalytic converter, a leaf blower is a two-stroke that burns oil by design. The amount of particulate emissions is hard to understate, and the amount of NOx these belch out is staggering. Asthma, cancer, heart disease, COPD, all are on the table with this type of system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-stroke_engine#Emissions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOx#Health_and_environment_eff...

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Suburban homeowners can use electric blowers. They're good enough now and not silent but way quieter and non-emitting. If you get the mower and trimmer and chainsaw, etc in the same system, they all share batteries. It's SO NICE not having to repair, refuel, tune, and tolerate small engines.

These tools probably aren't ready for professional landscapers yet but they're almost there.

You should have seen my 70s era Kawasaki 3 cylinder 500 cc road bike back in the day.

I’m pretty sure the blue cloud that thing belched at startup alone aired more pollution than a weed eater makes all year.

Weight and speed carried more weight than emissions back then. I acknowledge a healthy planet is better, but boy were those bikes fun.

A lot of 4-stroke don't have much emissions controls either although it does burn cleaner than a two stroke. If you buy heavy equipment like excavator or tractor under 25hp you can get it with no emissions controls which is highly sought after because they don't break down as often.

Most of them are four-stroke now. They just don't have any muffler on them.

I'm not sure where you are located, but that is not the case in the majority of the US. In most of the US they are overwhelmingly 2-stroke.

Just checked a couple local hardware store websites too to make sure I wasn't crazy... there aren't any 4-strokes leaf blowers available in-store, they're all 2-stroke.

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