Banning gas-powered lawn equipment may have unintended consequences

San Jose city council is reintroducing a plan to “buy back” gas-powered lawnmowers in hopes of reducing noise and local air pollution. This plan may come from good intentions, but there are tradeoffs and drawbacks that may hinder this ban’s effectiveness. Here are a few problems lawmakers should anticipate:

1. This plan disproportionately affects businesses that employ low-income workers. While this ban would hardly affect landowners who garden for an hour or two on weekends, gardeners who rely on long-lasting equipment to mow multiple lawns in a day will suffer a majority of consequences if gas-powered lawn equipment is banned. Even though technology has improved in recent years, battery-powered lawnmowers still only work for a little more than an hour at a time. Gardeners would therefore have to buy multiple pieces of equipment for every gas-powered tool they currently use. For businessowners whose job it is to cut grass the entire day, maintaining efficiency with multiple batteries would not only be cost prohibitive, but also could increase their environmental footprint.

2. Battery mining has immense environmental impact. Part of the stated goal of the “buy-back” program is to reduce San Jose’s environmental impact. Although this goal may be admirable, banning leafblowers and lawnmowers that use gasoline might not reduce San Jose’s environmental impact. Rather, it will export that impact to regions that mine the lithium and cobalt required to make high-powered batteries. Strip-mining these metals causes toxic chemicals to enter the atmosphere, causing problems like acid rain and smog. These environmental phenomena could still happen in San Jose as batteries leak, age, or are disposed of improperly. With the increased local demand for lithium batteries—caused by gardeners needing more than one new lawnmower or leafblower—these battery-caused environmental problems could become more acute. Moreover, with consumers and businesses desiring more battery-powered lawn equipment, manufacturing and shipping—which has a large carbon footprint—would increase dramatically in this business sector.

3. The government cannot ban everything that makes noise. Garden equipment is rarely if ever used during truly inconvenient times of day. One would be rightfully perplexed to see a gardening crew or homeowner working on their yard outside the hours of 8 AM to 6 PM. Furthermore, a double standard arises when evaluating how San Jose regulates noise pollution. The city’s airport allows booming jet planes to wake residents, rattle windows, and exceed CNEL noise levels orders of magnitude higher than leafblowers throughout the day. Planes are much louder than lawnmowers yet they are not subject to the same regulations.

4. “Buy-back” programs are inherently confiscatory. The term “buy-back” is yet another example of the euphemization of politics. If the government called the use of eminent domain to seize citizens’ land a “land buy-back program,” people would rightfully be mortified. Furthermore, San Jose cannot “buy back” something it never owned—in this case, gas-powered lawn equipment. This distinction, although it has no bearing on the merits of a lawn equipment confiscation policy, is important to state so that the real effects of this policy are properly understood.

These points may not determine whether a local ban and confiscation of gas-powered lawn equipment is the right policy for San Jose, but understanding any policy’s downsides is important for the electorate and for lawmakers. Before San Jose goes through with this long-considered policy, councilmembers should recognize that there is no government-led panacea to the issues that arise from gas-powered lawn equipment’s ubiquity.

— by Simon Gilbert, Opportunity Now Web Editor and sophomore at Claremont McKenna College, where he is studying history.