Louisville Magazine

JUL 2017

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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ulgc.net LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 7.17 39 pay) for a city license or permit. But buy a bunch of gas-powered equipment with noisy two- and four- stroke engines and rumble down skinny neighborhood streets to spiff up customers' yards — heck, what do we care? The irony is palpable. Peddlers do nobody any harm; lawn-care de- tachments, besides clogging up local left-turn lanes, unleash highly conse- quential noise and air pollution, most dangerously the latter. In 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency determined that exhaust and leakage from gas-powered lawn and garden equipment that year produced 6.3 million tons of volatile organic com- pounds, carbon monoxide, nitrous oxides and fine particulate matter, along with significant amounts of the cancer-causing hydrocarbons benzene and 1,3 butadiene. (It's hard to find newer EPA statistics in the climate-change-as-hoax U.S.) The major culprit is the cheap, light- weight but inefficient two-stroke engine found on most string trim- mers, leaf blowers and chainsaws, which use a gas-oil mixture for fuel. (EPA: Almost 90 percent of the fine particulate-matter emissions from lawn and garden equipment comes from two-stroke engines.) In an astounding test conducted by the automotive-info website Edmunds.com, a two-stroke leaf blower was found to have emitted 23 times more deadly carbon monoxide than a 411-horsepower Ford F-150 pickup truck, as well as 300 times more air-fouling hydrocarbons. To punctuate the latter point, the testing site noted that the hydrocar- bon emissions from a half-hour of yard work with the two-stroke leaf blower equaled the emissions from a 3,900-mile drive in the pickup. Many homeowners have gone electric or battery-powered with their string trimmers and lawn mow- ers. Many others would be embar- rassed to be seen using a noisy leaf blower rather than a rake. I wonder: How many lawn-service providers feel the same?

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