Before I recently moved across country, I disposed of my old 2 gallon gas can. Its the small gas can you use for the lawn mower and snow blower.

1300 miles away in my new state, I looked for a heavy duty old-fashion metal gas can with a simple metal spout. I could not find it at Lowes, Walmart, Home Depot, Northern Tool, Target, or Harbor Freight Tools. The only gas cans they sell nowadays is a plastic one with a complicated thin plastic twisty spring loaded mechanism on the spout. The directions suck and so does the spout. One little twist and the thin plastic breaks, causing the seal to break. Tip the spout towards the lawn mower and half of it spills on the ground and over your hands.

I have an acre to mow every week with my little push mower. It requires 3 fill ups every time I mow.

Here is the typical gas can.

The story behind the regulation was there was concern about the little vent hole on old cans along with vapor escape and spilling. So a new standard was adopted in California to eliminate vapors and spills. This was supposed to help with air quality and reduce smog. The EPA and the Federal Government soon adopted these standards to make them nationwide.

Here is a typical blog post about this subject



ep, that's right. The new gas cans with CARB-compliant spouts require three hands (at a minimum) to operate, inevitably cause the user to spill far more gasoline with each refuel of a lawn mower than he managed to spill over the previous decade in total, and flows with the velocity of a mouse with a bad prostate. So, ingenious Californians that we are, we've resorted to throwing the useless spouts away and simply pouring the gasoline from the container into a funnel, thereby eliminating all spillage and at the same time releasing approximately ten times the amount of aromatic fumes as before CARB got involved in the man-machine relationship.

Thus having proven the wisdom of bureaucrat-designed gas cans, the Federal government then decided that they should adopt CARB's brilliant dictates and apply them across this fruited plain. And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth by Joe Sixpack, followed by many YouTube videos of how to defeat the CARB/EPA dictated-designs with drills, duct tape, a six pack, and a poorly focused video camera. Meanwhile, enterprising individuals were selling pre-ban gas cans on eBay for $80 as a new wave of all-American handymen struggled in vain with latches, clasps, and leaking connectors, finally turning in frustration to their children for solutions (just like they did when they needed to get the child-proof cap off the aspirin bottle last time).