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From that article you linked to, while it's true that the figure for "NMHC" is higher (0.005g/min to 1.495g/min, yes this is almost 300x), this is just the worse case result - look at the other figures too: NOx is 0.005g/min to 0.010g/min (a doubling) and CO is 0.276g/min to 6.445g/min (about 25x). Of course, all of these figures will be dwarfed by CO2 emissions which will be roughly proportional to the amount of fuel used. Now consider the time spent doing these activities - 30 minutes compared to 47 hours (according to Google), so multiply all those per minute figures for the truck by 100 to make a fair comparison. Now, the blower is triple the "NMHC", 2% of the NOx, 25% (EDIT: I made a mistake before) of the CO and about 0.2% of the CO2 (100 gallons vs 0.2L). Honestly, I don't know what "NMHC" includes - as presumably it doesn't include NOx as that is called out separately, but whatever, it's just part of the emissions and so the claim that the image makes of "fewer hydrocarbon emissions" is clearly false. I'll agree that it seems to be a bad summary of the article which was "the emissions are dirtier". EDIT: Actually, I should add that the image has done a good of raising awareness that leaf blowers are clearly pretty dirty even despite not using much fuel, so I guess it served its purpose even if after looking at the sources, I'm still not really sure by how much in actual terms, because the things I know to look out for - CO and NOx - aren't as bad as claimed, only NMHC, something I've never heard of before, and I've no idea how bad that is. |