Leaves: How Nature's Gift Becomes a Menace

Many homeowners find it convenient to rake or blow their leaves to the curb each fall. The leaves are then scraped off the pavement and hauled out of town to be composted. There may be some logic to this approach, but there's also considerable illogic at work. The illogic plays out in many ways: expense, the hazards of blocked traffic and bike lanes, global warming gases from all the scraping, hauling and industrial composting, nutrient runoff into streams, impoverished and hardened urban soils, bias against homeowners on busy or narrow streets, and a scarred streetscape. Here are photos that illustrate some of the downsides.

Leaf piles in the streets push bicyclists and pedestrians (on streets with no sidewalks) out into traffic lanes. I've heard of near misses, particularly at night.

Cars, too, must swerve to avoid leaf piles. Here's a common situation. Police records show at least two auto accidents precipitated by leafpiles.

Removal of the above leaf pile left a dirty street and scarred ground. Rains will sweep nutrients from the remaining decomposing leaves and bare dirt into the local waterway, adding to nutrient pollution.

The irony is that regulations require that silt fencing be installed at construction sites to prevent the washing of sediment into our streams, and yet uncontainerized leaf collection exposes dirt and coats long stretches of streets with leaf residue that can then wash into those same streams.

Loose leaf collection discriminates against homeowners on busy streets, where they must pile their leaves on the grass rather than the pavement. Covered by leaves, the grass quickly dies, leaving bare dirt far into the next summer.

Grass also gets killed on narrow side streets like Chestnut. One exasperated resident of very narrow Bank Street told me of the racket caused by a landscape crew that blew leaves from the backyard into the street, where they interfered with traffic for many days.

It's ironic to see this fertilizer sign on a lawn facing Hamilton Ave, while at the same time the lawn service is killing the grass with piles of leaves. You could ask "What are people thinking?", but I doubt much thinking is going on. Rather, there's a blind adherence to two customs: fertilizing lawns and blowing leaves towards the street.

Princeton main thoroughfare, Nassau St, should be a pride and joy, but the decorative flags and hanging flower baskets during the summer contrast with the lingering scars left behind by fall leaf pickup.

Here's another stretch of Nassau Street left bare and muddy after the grass-killing leaf piles have been removed.

And then there's the actual scars on the pavement, left behind by the "claw" that picks up the leaves.

It's hard to photograph the annual expense, which may be up around $1 million, or the hardened, leaf-cheated urban soil that sheds rain and adds to flooding, or the fossil carbon rising from all the public works department's machines to speed climate change.

Some people think that the answer lies in education and better enforcement of the town's leaf ordinance. I used to think the same. But past education efforts, of which I was a part, had negligible impact. Enforcement was tried, proved time consuming and was abandoned. Robo calls with schedule reminders have helped some, but it's doubtful that landscape crews, with rapid employee turnover and language barriers, will ever coordinate their work to conform to the town's five zone leaf pickup.

Blowing leaves into the street is much like being allowed to send underground carbon up into the air as CO2 from our exhaust pipes. The legacy of all that private convenience is a shared public burden. Deprived of the convenience of doing environmental harm, we would respond, as humans do, by being resourceful and inventive. In the case of leaves, we'd mow some of the leaves back into the lawn and blow others into a back corner of the yard to kill the weeds. We'd devote a tiny portion of our (largely unused) yards to leaf corrals that return nutrients to the soil, and if need be we'd stuff any leaves left over into yardwaste bags and rollcarts for efficient pickup. We'd take as our inspiration nature itself, which never hauls valuable nutrients away, but keeps them close by, to return to the soil from which they came. And we'd take pride in clean and verdant streetscapes.

Princeton doesn't need to be spending $1 million for a brand of leaf management that forces us to navigate through a scarred mess much of the year. We're better than this.