Compostables and Self-Expression in Princeton's Streets

It's not clear whether the descriptions below reflect merely an aesthetic blight or are also evidence of a deep inefficiency. Princeton has never calculated the full cost of its collection of leaves and brush, but one estimate put the annual cost at close to $1 million. It seems to be hard for municipalities to track the cost of individual services, which in turn makes it hard to determine whether another approach would be less expensive. A comparative figure I was able to obtain, after considerable effort, from a municipality that requires compostable materials be containerized, was $250,000/year. That number, delivered to me by an environmental commission member in Ann Arbor, MI, suggests that a city four times larger than Princeton is able to deliver a comparable service for a quarter the cost. That works out to being 16 times cheaper, and in Ann Arbor residents can toss food scraps in the compost bin with leaves and sticks--essentially two services in one. Whether accurate or not, the number suggests that an open mind towards other approaches would be worth Princeton's while.

This post looks at the status quo, and also points to one of the constraints that is holding Princeton back from considering more cost-effective approaches to collection of compostables.

Princeton's streets are never dull. There are always new designs being etched in the pavement, like this one, left by a giant single-clawed machine that periodically lumbers by. The scars look lasting, but usually disappear in a day or two.

Each etching is different. This one looks like a baleen whale balancing on its nose.

The varied shapes of scars are preceded by an endless variety of piled sticks and leaves, each piling an expression of the homeowner's or landscaper's degree of indifference to town regulations.

Some are a jubilantly defiant mix of multiple violations, with dirt, sticks, leaves, and pizza boxes all in a jumble.

Another homeowner put sticks out in containers, not knowing that the proper way is to make a mess in the street by piling them loose.

On another street, this highly ordered progression of carefully assembled pilettes of sticks went above and beyond the complex requirements detailed on the town website.

Yet another resident carefully separated out leaves and brush, but they weren't picked up, perhaps because they were placed too close to the stormdrain. Many piles put out at the wrong time or in the wrong manner linger on the streets for days, weeks or months.

Just down the street, yet another resident had an extraordinary display of tulips and weeping cherries in a sea of lush green turf. How better to show it off than to illegally pile grass clippings on the street, to rot and fester in the public space?

For those of us who have moved to New Jersey from other parts of the country where yardwaste is either containerized or composted in the backyard, this use of the streets for endlessly varied pilings and scraping seems oddly unattractive and inefficient.

Princeton has an added twist to this deeply embedded tradition. Because the town composts most of its leaves and brush at the Lawrenceville Ecological Center, it has to conform to Lawrenceville's requirements. Turns out that the composting center has a grinder that cannot grind leaves and brush at the same time. So Princeton has to make separate trips up and down the streets with its giant clawing machine to pick up either one or the other.

I had never quite believed that the town actually makes separate pickups for leaves and brush. People are always putting them out together, and they disappear in one fell swoop. But on one special week this year, the schedule for picking up leaves and brush coincided, as if they were planets lining up in the night sky. In our section of town, that special week was the week of April 22. Would the town actually make two separate trips through all the streets to selectively pick up leaves and brush?

The answer proved to be yes. There, can you see it in the distance? A tiny pile of sticks was left behind when a big pile of leaves was taken away.

And here, too, some leaves were left behind while most of the rest of the pile was taken.

For anyone who believes government services should be efficiently delivered, the vision of a very big and heavy, gas-guzzling machine and its entourage of other heavy trucks having to do a double pass through the streets goes against common sense. Other municipalities have grinders that can handle leaves and brush at the same time. Why not Lawrenceville? On the other hand, some residents may find this display of massive machinery reassuring, it being the most visible evidence that the government is providing services, no matter how Sisyphean.

Containerizing leaves and brush in large compost carts, as is done elsewhere in the country, would likely save a lot of money. But such efficiency and conformity seems to run against the grain of Princeton and other New Jersey towns. There's something embedded in the culture, as deeply as the requisite swath of idle green lawn, that drives this perpetual spilling from private onto public space. Though it is visible, and to my eyes unattractive, it seems for many to be as unnoticed as the carbon dioxide we pour into that other public space, the atmosphere.

Gone would be the varied etchings in the pavement. The endlessly varied piles of sticks, leaves, and dirt would disappear behind the conformist green or brown plastic walls of a compost cart. The giant claw's back and forth, fossil-fueled dance as it scrapes, lifts, and loads leaves and brush into a dumptruck would be replaced by the steady, orderly progression of a truck down the street, emptying each container in turn. Our streets would be cleaner, pickups more predictable and frequent, money would be saved, but at what cost in individual expression?

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.

Cleaner Streets, Lower Taxes, Healthier Yards

Today, May 1, property taxes are due in Princeton. In this post, we explore one way in which our tendency to work against nature rather than with it, and to value private space at the expense of public space, contributes to high property taxes and degraded streetscapes.

There are many yards in Princeton that demonstrate the same point, but I'll use this one as an example because it's the most dramatic. Most front yards are very plain--a patch of lawn, a few shrubs pushed against the foundation. But here's one in which many flowers--in this season daffodils--have been planted for the public's benefit. Such a contribution to the public viewscape, and the minimization of unused lawn, is to be celebrated.

And yet the whole floristic effect is contradicted by what's going on between sidewalk and street. Bare dirt, dead grass, a pile of brush and leaves. It's like a woman wearing a flowery print dress and worn-out workboots. This is a busy street, and the yard shows clear intention to present a grand display of flowers to the town. There's pride in yard and yet complete lack of pride in the public right of way.

Here's what it looks like from the street. One can't see the flowers for the yardwaste. Again, there are hundreds of similar piles of yardwaste in town, suggesting that this is not one homeowner's approach but in fact a horticultural norm. The contradiction of well-tended yard and brushpile at the curb is so jarring, and yet so common, that I start to get that emperor-has-no-clothes feeling, as if people are able to filter out what is right in front of their eyes.

One explanation for this is that while I may see leaves in their ecological context as nature's way of protecting and returning nutrients to the soil, many others may view it rather as a form of dust that must be swept away to create a clean appearance. It may be that the pile of yardwaste at the curb is actually a source of pride--proof that the homeowners work hard to take care of their yard.

There is, then, repeated in hundreds of yards all over town, an unwritten agreement that the shared streetscape must be sacrificed in order to sustain order and neatness on the private property on the house side of the sidewalk. This directly contradicts the shared sentiment distilled into town ordinances. Ordinances require that trash cans and recycling buckets not linger at the curb for more than a day. State and local laws restrict how long leaves, etc. can linger at the curb. Streets must be swept by a street cleaner once a month. Common practice among residents largely defeats these attempts to regulate and value the appearance and function of the streetscape.

One significant component of the scene is the stormdrain. Water can seep into cracks between storm drains and pavement, causing a progressive deterioration that undermines the pavement and leads ultimately to the collapse of the sewer grate that covers the storm drain. Given how much time and money the town must devote to collecting leaves and brush dumped year-round in the street, often illegally, it's important to ask to what extent other maintenance needs are being deferred, and what the budgetary consequences are.

The piling of leaves, etc. at the curb spawns imitation by neighbors looking for visual cues about how to behave. Pickups in most neighborhoods this time of year are monthly, and if a resident imitates neighbors rather than pay attention to the pickup schedule, the pile of leaves will kill the grass before pickup day arrives, further marring the streetscape.

One alternative is to pile or corral leaves in a back corner of the property, perhaps screened by shrubs, and let them return to the soil. This approach is less taxing on town services and the eyes of passersby, and is ideal for storing leaves while keeping them from blowing around. Its only drawback is that neighbors can't see it, and therefore won't think it's the way leaves are supposed to be handled. In other words, good behavior is invisible, while illegal dumping in the streets is highly visible and gets copied by neighbors.

Cleaning out some flower beds this spring, I decided to set an example and put the leaves in a leaf corral in the front yard, tucked behind some shrubs. It's neater than piling the leaves in the street, and even oak leaves quickly start to settle down in the green wire corral, making room for more cuttings through the summer.

Already, the pile has dropped a foot, and the green wire is almost invisible.

There's symbolism in this small corral of leaves. It says that, with just a little adaptation, we can play along with nature's endless cycling of nutrients from soil to tree and back again, rather than seeing nature as a nuisance or the enemy. It says our shared, public right of way is meant not to be a dumping ground, but rather a source of pride. And it says that public employees have more important things to do than chase after leaves that homeowners can easily use to their advantage on their own property.

Use Those Leaves in the Yard

This fall, rather than dump leaves in the street or stuff them in bags, consider these options.

Mow them back into the lawn

The easiest option by far is to mow the leaves back into the lawn--an approach recommended by county extension offices around the country, and even by company sites like Scotts Miracle Grow. They've studied it, and concluded that the ground up leaves provide valuable fertilizer for the lawn, and do not cause any problem with thatch.

Some kinds of leaves make this method particularly easy. Pine needles and honey locust leaves are so small they don't even need to be chopped up by a mower, or can be raked underneath shrubs to serve as a mulch. Leaves of silver or red maple also tend to "melt" back into the lawn, decomposing quickly.

Grind leaves up with an electric leaf mower/vac

This will take care of leaves the lawnmower can't reach. Electric leaf blowers are quieter than the gas varieties, and some designs can be reversed to vacuum up leaves and grind them. I have not tried this method, but the NPR show You Bet Your Garden had a segment singing the praises of leaves ground up this way as mulch for flower beds. Even if you buy locally, you can check out reviews of various brands here on Amazon, with prices well under $100.

Make Room(s) For Leaves in the Yard

If you choose to collect leaves into piles rather than grind them, the question becomes where to put them if not on the street. One factor that makes people more likely to blow leaves out to the street is that most yards lack "rooms." The typical yard has shrubs pushed against the house and fenceline, defining only one sprawling "room" that extends uninterrupted to the curb, all of which is then required to be ornamental.

Houses have rooms that separate utility and storage from living areas, so why not yards? If you use shrubs or wooden walls to define and screen small utility areas in the yard, it becomes very easy to store leaves while they decompose and slowly return to the soil from which they came. Nature's miraculous trash-free economy is then allowed to function, and we're spared a big mess in the streets and the considerable municipal cost of hauling, grinding and mechanically turning leaves at a distant composting center.

The photo shows one such configuration in a friend's backyard. The wall provides screening between the utility area with compost pile and tools, and the ornamental garden to the left.

Another way to break up space and screen a leaf pile from more ornamental areas is to plant shrubs out a distance from the fence. The leaves can then be piled inbetween the shrubs and the fence. Though a back corner is the most logical location, the one in the photo is next to the street.

Here's the view from the street. The shrubs are privet, but a native evergreen alternative would be inkberry (Ilex glabra). Other smaller native shrubs--not evergreen but with attractive flowers, would be Itea virginica, Clethra alnifolia or Fothergilla. The main idea is to reconfigure how shrubs of any kind are planted in the yard, so as to create refuges for leaf piles that will quickly be flattened down by the weight of rain and snow and benefit shrubs and trees through the steady process of decomposition. Sectioning off a "room" in the yard also breaks up the monotony of shrubs lining the fenceline and foundation.

Whether ground up or piled in a corner, leaves serve as a natural fertilizer and increase the capacity of the yard to absorb rain. The more organic matter a yard contains, the more moisture it can hold, which helps buffer the yard from extremes of rain and drought. A soil rich in organic matter welcomes the rain, which in turn reduces runoff into the streets and, collectively, the amount of flooding downstream.