As November begins, leaves are piling up around the city of Athens and residents must start raking the copious amount of foliage out of their yards.
For those who don’t want to dispose of the bags of waste themselves, Athens offers a service that goes around to people’s houses to pick up bagged leaves and take them away for $1.50 a bag. The service will also vacuum loose leaves on the curb free of charge.
The service is a convenience for many families, and it benefits the local environment as well.
Rather than being thrown away, these leaves are locally composted and used to put nutrients back into the soil.
Andy Stone has been a city engineer and director of Public Works for the city of Athens since 2003. He said since he’s been there, the leaves have always been repurposed and never brought to a landfill, which is good both for the environment and the office’s finances.
“No leaves are brought to the dump,” Stone said. “It’s expensive to take material to a landfill … so we don’t do that if we don’t have to.”
Instead, those leaves are brought to different locations around Athens.
“There are a couple different locations,” Stone said. “Some of the leaves go to the community gardens … some go to local landowners who ask for them for bedding.”
Along with being distributed across the city, Ohio University uses some of those leaves.
“A significant number (of leaves) go to OU for compost,” Stone said.
The university has the largest in-vessel composting facility of any college in the United States, according to OU’s website. Here, the leaves are repurposed into soil, which is used across campus.
Albert J. Lang is the owner of Greenleaf Landscapes and Garden, a compost facility in Marietta that uses leaves from local homeowners in its soil.
He said all the leaves that come into their facility are repurposed, and those leaves offer a huge benefit to the soil.
“Compost will give the soil moisture retention,” he said. “It has nutrient value (and) it won’t dry out as fast.”
As for leaves on campus, many students are indifferent as to whether they are raked and taken to other places or left on the ground.
Some like how they look, but wouldn’t mind if they were taken away to be repurposed.
Dan Kilkenny, a freshman studying digital media, is mostly indifferent to the leaves on campus. He doesn’t feel strongly one way or another and would be fine with the leaves being repurposed elsewhere.
“I mean, they look pretty,” he said. “But I couldn’t care less (if they were composted).”
