PACIFIC GROVE — To some, they are important landscaping tools. To others, they are loud, dirty and unhealthy. What’s certain is everyone has an opinion about leaf blowers, and those opinions are likely to surface Wednesday when Pacific Grove elected officials will consider banning them.

“There’s been a slow but steady stream of complaints by many residents about leaf blowers, particularly with the noise level,” said Pacific Grove Mayor Bill Peake.

Landscapers and gardeners decry the move but acknowledge that banning blowers seem to be inevitable. Geovanni Oseguera has owned and operated Greener Bay Landscaping for 20 years. The company serves customers from the Monterey Peninsula to San Francisco, including Pacific Grove. He has seen bans go into effect in Palo Alto, Redwood City, Los Gatos, Los Altos and Sunnyvale.

He said he has had to explain to his customers that he will need to charge higher prices because his crews will need to stay on-site longer to clean up leaves that otherwise would have been removed faster with a leaf blower. But he said his customers have been accommodating about the need to raise prices.

“I don’t do landscaping because it is fun; I do it to make money, and my customers understand that,” Oseguera said.

Others have seen the increasing pressure on gasoline-powered leaf blowers push gardeners and landscapers toward electric products. John Lens has owned and operated Seaside-based John’s Gardening Service for the past 25 years. His business also serves Pacific Grove, and while he said it will be “a bummer” if leaf blowers are banned, he has seen many in the industry begin shifting to either cord or battery-powered electric blowers.

Certainly waking up on a Sunday morning to the sound of a leaf blower blasting outside a window in a neighbor’s yard can be disturbing, but the real danger is not what can be seen or heard, rather what can be smelled. Think leaf blowers aren’t as bad a pollutant as cars?

According to estimates by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, emissions of smog-producing substances from mowers, blowers and other small internal combustion engines last year were 81% as high as the amount from standard sedans. In the Los Angeles area, small combustion engines are projected to overtake cars as a contributor to smog this year, according to a study by Washington University in St. Louis.

A consumer-grade leaf blower emits more pollutants than a 6,200-pound 2011 Ford F-150 SVT Raptor, according to tests conducted by Edmunds’ InsideLine.com, an online resource for automotive enthusiasts.

The tests found that a Ryobi 4-stroke leaf blower kicked out almost seven times more nitrogen oxides and 13.5 times more carbon monoxide than the Ford pickup truck. An Echo 2-stroke leaf blower performed even worse, generating 23 times the carbon monoxide and nearly 300 times more hydrocarbons than the truck.

Elevated levels of nitrogen dioxide can cause damage to the human respiratory tract and increase a person’s vulnerability to, and the severity of, respiratory infections and asthma, according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

There are several reasons why leaf blowers are far worse than cars for air pollution and adverse health effects. The first is that modern cars are outfitted with technologies that reduce and capture many of these pollutants before they are released into the atmosphere.

In addition, most gas-powered leaf blowers operate with a two-stroke engine. These engines lack an independent lubrication system, so fuel has to be mixed with oil. Burning oil and gas together emits a number of harmful toxic pollutants into the air, including carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons (a carcinogenic gas that also causes smog).

Pacific Grove is not alone in addressing the problem. Carmel was the first city in California to ban leaf blowers in 1975 and in Monterey, an online petition has circulated for the better part of a year asking Mayor Clyde Roberson to take action toward banning leaf blowers.

The noise and chemical pollution from leaf blowers hurt humans, pets and the local fauna, wrote Romina Marazzato Sparano, who had posted the online petition. The World Health Organization, air resources boards and governments, have all clearly stated they should be banned, she said.

“There is a complete lack of understanding about these dangers, especially in an age where science has become a matter of opinion,” Marazzato Sparano said. “We’ve become numb in America and unaware about how pollution works.”