When my family moved to Oak Park five years ago, I was impressed by the many services our tax dollars funded, but two really stood out: fall leaf pickup and the residential composting program.
As we all know, one of those services has changed. As the owners of a corner lot that is home to what I can only assume is Oak Park’s Most Productive Oak Tree, the curbside service made it simpler to manage our leaves while also managing a baby and toddler at home.
However, this is not another piece decrying the decision to change the leaf pickup program — it’s a done deal and it’s time to adapt. Instead, I’m going to share how I plan to deal with the change in service: in part by taking even more advantage of my other favorite service, the CompostAble program.
Composting food and yard waste at home is one of the best ways individuals can make a positive climate impact. It reduces landfill waste, cuts down methane emissions, captures carbon, and improves soil health. And until I moved to Oak Park, I found the process complicated, time intensive and … kinda gross.
But the CompostAble program not only makes it easier to compost food and yard waste, it has the shocking quality of being as easy, or even easier, than throwing it away.
For $16.31/month (we split the cost with our neighbor and share a bin), you get a grey bin in your alley and a small bin for your kitchen. It requires limited behavior change because instead of putting food waste into the garbage, you just put it into the bin instead.
When it’s time to take out the trash, it’s one more small bag to bring to the alley. But it’s not just food. You can put any soiled paper item into it: pizza boxes, take-out bags, napkins, and more. As a family of four with two picky kids and a weekly pizza habit, it’s been pretty eye opening to see just how much food and paper we throw away each week. We’re grateful for the opportunity to minimize our impact.
But the real time and $$ saver comes from the yard waste. No more bags or stickers — everything goes right into the bin. Fallen branches, tree trimmings, endless weeds, the evil rose bush I finally dug out, all right into the bin. Now it will also be a receptacle for my leaves this fall.
I know this bin alone cannot contain all the leaves from Oak Park’s Most Productive Oak Tree, but it’s still a key part of my five-part master plan:
- Bye bye raking, hello electric leaf blower. It’s fast, it’s quiet, it’s sustainable, and it’s as satisfying as power-washing my patio. So satisfying, in fact, I could be convinced to come blow leaves around my neighbors’ yards in exchange for a post-blow cocktail.
- Get into leaf composting. There is an underutilized corner of my yard right under Big Oak where its leaves naturally pile up. I’m embracing the chaos and turning this corner into my leaf-compost zone. We’ll buy a few leaf-composting bins — relatively inexpensive or DIY-able — to store the leaves and let nature do its thing. By spring, I’ll have free leaf mulch ready for my garden beds and any neighbor who would like some for theirs. If it’s too much, I can easily wheel my village compost bin over and fill it up at the same time.
- Mulch the leaves with our mower. Mulching, I’ve learned, is a fancy word for mowing over the leaves on your lawn. Mowing the lawn takes less time than raking the lawn, and leaving the shredded leaves on the grass is good for your soil — win-win!
- Leave the leaves we don’t get to. It’s remarkable just how many leaves Big Oak drops all through the fall, especially on our parkway, which is where we really got the most bang for our buck raking them into the street. At some point, we’ll call it on the mulching and just follow the village’s guidance to leave the leaves where they are.
- Not use a single bag. I wish I could say this was part of some bold sustainability statement, but the truth is, I just don’t want to deal with the whole bagging thing.
Behavior change is hard, but my hope is that we will discover, come December, that we didn’t spend any more time managing our leaves than we did in years past. In the meantime, I invite my fellow Oak Parkers to join me in participating in the village’s home composting program, a great deal for residents and our climate.
Nicole Chavas, an Oak Park resident with a background in urban planning, is president and co-founder of Greenprint Partners, a firm that manages climate resiliency and stormwater management projects.