AAAR 34th Annual Conference
October 12 - October 16, 2015
Hyatt Regency
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Abstract View
Leaf Blower Dust Resuspension Characterization
JOSE MORENO, Stella Moreno, Antonio García-Sanchez, Belen Elvira-Rendueles, Maria Jose Martinez-Garcia, Technical University of Cartagena
Abstract Number: 653 Working Group: Urban Aerosols
Abstract During the last few years there is a growing use of leaf blowers to assist the street-sweepers on their duties. From outside it looks clever; they blow the dirt from the isolated corners to the open street where a road vacuum-sweeper removes the dirt. When asked, the responsible of the municipal service states that it is a matter of efficiency. With one leaf blower they advance three times faster than with conventional rakes or brooms, he affirms.
Even though ample references are available in the literature about the negative effects of leaf blowers both on the worker side and on the general population health; very little is available from European cities, and particularly scarce from Spanish cities. Due to the growing concern about the use of leaf blowers as ordinary tools in our streets, in our group we have started a project to determine the nature of the hazards for the general population.
We have been collecting settleable particulate matter and characterizing its heavy metal content from the last 3 decades; together with the aerobiological samples where we have an extensive database of pollen and spores from 1993. So we have an idea on what it is present on the re-suspended dust by leaf blowers. But we lack of information on many others components that may be present and may pose a health hazard to the inadvertent population.
In this poster the preliminary results of the study are presented. A set of samples were collected on different parts of our municipality where the leaf blowers are used. From the first observations, we found that all samples showed the presence of insect faeces and mercury was present in different degrees. We hope to forewarn the media about the risk of leaf blowers and limit their use in our cities.