More US cities and towns are slapping limits — or even bans — on gas-powered garden tools like leaf blowers to fight pollution and noise

• More municipalities are looking to place limits or even bans on some gas-powered garden tools.
• Outsized pollution and noise from devices like gas-powered leaf blowers are driving the efforts.
• Pollution from using a commercial leaf blower for one hour equals driving a small car 1,100 miles.
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It's been a quiet couple of years at the historic Tudor Place mansion in Washington, DC, where descendants of Martha Washington lived for generations. 

The recent hush owes to the estate's switch to electric leaf blowers, string trimmers, and other motorized tools used to maintain its 5.5 acres of lush grounds dotted with poplar trees and heirloom roses.

"We have neighbors very close to us on one side, so they appreciate that the equipment is quieter, doesn't pollute," Allyson Whalley, the director of buildings, gardens, and grounds at Tudor Place, told Insider.

The gas-to-electric transition at the neoclassical landmark, which has stood for more than two centuries in Georgetown, came ahead of a ban on the use of gas-powered leaf blowers that went into effect in the nation's capital last year. 

With summer heating up, so too are the instruments of tidy lawns. Increasingly, these totems of suburbia are electric. That's in part because more than 150 municipalities across the US now limit or prohibit the use of gas-powered leaf blowers, which produce an outsize amount of pollution and a din that can ruin even the nicest of summer days. 

There's more action to come. California next year will ban the sale of new gas-powered leaf blowers and lawn mowers, among other equipment, though the state will still allow existing devices to be used. 

When it comes to creating smog, gas-powered lawn equipment punches way above its weight class. One example: Operating a commercial leaf blower for an hour generates as much pollution as driving a small car about 1,100 miles, according to the California Air Resources Board. 

That pollution — and the noise — are particularly hazardous to the people using the equipment. That's in part because about 30% of the oil-and-gas mix that powers so-called two-stroke engines, which often run tools like leaf blowers and string trimmers, isn't burned. Instead, it gets kicked off in tiny droplets that users of the equipment can then inhale. 

Environmental groups have argued that lawns, in general, are the bigger problem. Our collective obsession with emerald-toned backdrops makes grass the largest irrigated crop in the US. It requires enormous amounts of water and synthetic fertilizers — all for something that isn't consumed by anyone but for a few lucky goats. 

Some landscapers have objected that going electric can be an expensive switch and have said that newer gas models are quieter. Kalen Roach, a spokesperson for the nonprofit DC Sustainable Energy Utility, which has offered subsidies to help residents of Washington and the lawn companies that operate there move to electric garden equipment, said there are challenges with shifting but they don't have to be dealbreakers. 

Companies can invest in charging infrastructure that goes in the back of a van or a work truck, Roach said. And they can acquire extra batteries that can be swapped out when other ones run low.

For Whalley and her crew tending to Tudor Place, the change meant shuffling equipment around to find enough spots to plug in all the battery chargers. "We popped a couple of fuses figuring that all out," she said. 

She's since upgraded the 1960s-era wiring where the equipment is kept and no longer has to send devices away for preventative maintenance, which can take weeks, or store various combinations of fuel, the way she did with gas models.

Whalley was already a proponent of ditching the gas-powered tools because she'd done so at her own home. "I realized how much nicer the experience is for not only the person operating the equipment, but anybody else who has been subjected to the sound and the fumes of the gas."