QCDC and Related Groups In The News
In October, 2016, researcher Erica Walker (below), a doctoral student at Harvard's Chan School of Public Health, released her 2016 Greater Boston Noise Report. It's worth reading for its public health, technological, and sociological aspects. The main link is here, with accompanying blog here.
Erica Walker, from the Noise and the City site. (Photo by Julio Cesar Roman)
This article contains Atlantic notes by James Fallows and others about local-level civic activism in the center of a large-scale political action, Washington D.C.
As I mentioned yesterday in another note on Erie, Pennsylvania, I’ll try to send out some reports on still-functional local-level activities around the country.
The Beaufort Gazette reports on a shift in several coastal communities in South Carolina away from two-stroke gas-powered lawn equipment, and toward quieter and cleaner battery-powered machinery. Sample:
One of the area’s largest landscaping contractors thinks it can make those interruptions a little less grating. The Greenery is introducing battery-powered equipment in places like Beaufort’s Henry. C. Chambers Waterfront Park, Sun City in Okatie and Harbour Town on Hilton Head Island.
The company has purchased battery-operated Stihl backpack blowers and hedge trimmers, though the number is still only a small fraction of the gas-powered inventory.
The new blowers maxed out at 78 decibels on an iPad decibel-meter application Friday in Waterfront Park. The gas blowers peaked at 93 decibels....
Noise exposure has been an issue for officials with the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, said Jerry Ashmore, The Greenery’s workforce and safety director. OSHA officials monitored Greenery employees in February, measuring sound levels each hour for eight hours and averaging their findings.
Federal regulators don’t want workers exposed to noise above 85 to 87 decibels for an extended time, Ashmore said, adding the Greenery was within those limits with gas blowers.
And here is a video from the site.
WAMU, the Washington D.C. public radio station based at American University, has a very interesting report about the pianist and composer Haskell Small, who pioneered some of the earliest DC-area efforts to limit ambient noise. The radio broadcast, by Matthew Schwartz, is here. An Atlantic item about Small (and about this report) is here.
Haskell Small at his piano. Photo by Matthew Schwartz / WAMU.
At the popular and influential tech site Slashdot, Hugh Pickens writes about the technological shift away from two-stroke engines, because of the emerging evidence of their public-health effects and menace.
Reporting from North Carolina, Lawrence Richards of The Guardian goes into the interacting political, economic, technological, and cultural aspects of the effort to change lawn-care practices. His piece also quotes one of the main lobbyists for the industry in its similar discussions around the country.
In September, 2013, Brian Palmer of the Washington Post had an introduction to the environmental and public-health challenges created by two-stroke engines in leaf blowers and lawn mowers. Sample:
Cities where two-stroke engines are in particularly wide use suffer terribly from air pollution. Some of India’s urban centers, for example, are draped in heavy soot, a problem due in large part to auto-rickshaws powered by two-stroke engines. More than a decade ago, Delhi phased out tens of thousands of auto-rickshaws with two-stroke engines in favor of those with four-stroke engines that run on natural gas....
In leaf blowers, two-stroke engines have been shown to emit contaminants comparable to large automobiles. A 2011 test by the car experts at Edmunds showed that “a consumer-grade leaf blower emits more pollutants than a 6,200-pound 2011 Ford F-150 SVT Raptor.” The company subjected a truck, a sedan, a four-stroke and a two-stroke leaf blower to automotive emissions tests and found that under normal usage conditions — alternating the blower between high power and idle, for example — the two-stroke engine emitted nearly 299 times the hydrocarbons of the pickup truck and 93 times the hydrocarbons of the sedan. The blower emitted many times as much carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides as well. The four-stroke engine performed significantly better than the two-stroke in most of the categories, but still far worse than the car engines.
The takeaway is that if you fret about the air pollution coming out of your car’s tailpipe, you should avoid gas-powered leaf blowers.
