Overview:
Join your neighbors in making San Carlos a cleaner, healthier, and more environmentally friendly community by supporting a ban on gas-powered leaf blowers. 

San Carlos is truly the City of Good Living, but we can make it even better by addressing the environmental and health impacts of gas-powered leaf blowers. These devices emit harmful pollutants, create excessive noise, and negatively affect the health of residents and workers. By transitioning to electric equipment, we can reduce pollution, protect our health, and support a quieter, cleaner city.

What We’re Asking For
We’re urging the City of San Carlos to:

• Implement a full ban on gas-powered blowers this year
• Work with a group like Peninsula Clean Energy to secure a grant for a rebate program to make this transition affordable for everyone—residents and commercial landscapers alike. We would propose:
  
  • Residents: $100 per household toward the purchase of an electric blower.
  • Commercial landscapers: $500 per business license, enough to cover the cost of several powerful electric backpack blowers.

Why It Matters

Environmental Impact

• Air Pollution: Gas-powered blowers emit harmful pollutants like carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter, contributing to smog and respiratory issues.
  • A 2011 study by Edmunds found that 30 minutes of gas blower use produces as much pollution as driving a gas-guzzling pickup truck over 3,000 miles!
  • According to the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the two-stroke leaf blowers and similar equipment produce more ozone pollution than all of California’s tens of millions of cars, combined.
• Water Pollution: Runoff from blowers carries pollutants into our waterways, affecting drinking water and polluting rivers, lakes, and oceans.

Health Concerns
Children and immunocompromised individuals are particularly vulnerable to these effects. Children are most susceptible because they breathe more air per pound of body weight than adults. When exposed to even small amounts of toxic chemicals at critical periods of development (windows of vulnerability), they can suffer from both acute and long term health effects.

• Carcinogenic Pollutants: Emissions contain cancer-causing chemicals like benzene and formaldehyde. The World Health Organization, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. National Toxicology Program all agree that benzene is a well-established cause of cancer, particularly leukemia.
• Respiratory Issues: Particulate matter worsens asthma, allergies, and other respiratory conditions. The particulate matter swept into the air by blowers is composed of dust, fecal matter, pesticides, fungi, chemicals, fertilizers, spores, and street dirt which consists of lead and organic and elemental carbon (source).
• Hearing Loss: Noise levels from gas blowers can exceed 95 decibels for operators and 65–80 decibels at 50 feet (source), far exceeding safe thresholds recommended by the World Health Organization and OSHA.

Community Well-being

• Quality of Life: Beyond its direct effects on hearing, chronic low-level noise exposure can cause or exacerbate cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, sleep disturbances, stress, mental health and cognition problems (source).
• Healthier Neighborhoods: Cleaner air and quieter streets benefit everyone.

Why Now?
In 2021, AB 1346 went into effect in California, banning the sale of gas-powered blowers and other small off-road engines starting January 1, 2024. Many Bay Area cities have already taken the next step by implementing local bans, including Hillsborough, Burlingame, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Atherton, Los Gatos, Cupertino, Mill Valley, Oakland, and most recently, Millbrae (effective July 1, 2025). It’s time for San Carlos to lead on this issue too.