Composts rake 'em in

As the colors turn and home- owners reach for the rakes, there's new satisfaction in bringing in the annual crop of fall foliage.

Seventeen years after Minnesota banned leaves from landfills, metro residents have mastered the job of leaf recycling. Most metro leaves get from yards to compost sites. Only 2 percent wind up buried with garbage.

"One of the things we can say about that ban is that it did work," said Ginny Black of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. "It turned out to be even more beneficial than we thought," because leaves buried in landfills produce hot methane gas that contributes to greenhouse gases linked to climate change.

How the recycling works and where leaves go depends on where residents live. Some cities -- including Maple Grove, Brooklyn Park and Crystal -- offer a leaf dropoff site to make it easy and affordable for residents to follow the rules. St. Louis Park and Robbinsdale contract with one hauler for curb pickup to keep the price down. Others, including Edina, Eden Prairie and Bloomington, leave it to residents to get rid of leaves through their private garbage haulers. Roseville sends a vacuum truck around the city to suck up leaves residents rake to the curb.

However it works, leaf recycling now runs like clockwork, with little government oversight.

Only one prominent issue remains: Should homeowners be permitted to use plastic bags for leaf pickup?

Plastic mixed with leaves reduces the value of the final recycling product -- compost. Rep. Paul Gardner, DFL-Shoreview, plans to address that issue at the Capitol next year. He would like to encourage the use of bags that decompose.

The decentralized and varied approach to the recycling chore developed through trial and error starting in 1990, when the state law took effect.

"Legislators didn't tell anybody where it [yard waste] was going to go. They just said where it wasn't going to go," said Ed Lynde of Lynde's Greenhouse and Nursery in Maple Grove.

The state left the solutions up to the ingenuity of local businesses and local government.

With a partner, Lynde opened one of the first private yard waste centers in Maple Grove.

Ramsey County's response to the ban was to upgrade seven informal yard waste sites and operate them as a county service to make it easy and cheap for residents to recycle, said John Springman, Ramsey's environmental health supervisor.

In contrast, Hennepin County wanted out of the leaf collecting business. "We allowed our yard waste collection system to be privatized," said Paul Kroening, Hennepin recycling coordinator. "Almost all the private haulers have provided separate yard waste collection for their customers that pay for that service."

So, where do all the leaves go?

Some cities, including Plymouth, take yard waste at small local sites. But the bulk of metro leaves go to one of 17 large compost centers that have permits from the state to run composting operations.

Plastic bags a big issue

Ten of those centers are operated by Resource Recovery Technologies (RRT), which takes leaves from most commercial haulers.

Its location in Shakopee takes in most of the leaves from area haulers that are in plastic bags.

"One of the biggest issues we have is yard waste in a plastic bag," said Judy Purman, environmental compliance manager for RRT. If the leaves come in a plastic bag, the bag is shredded up with the leaves. "There will be little pieces of plastic bags in the finished product."

Although RRT's sales of compost grow each year as more people learn about its advantages -- that it mixes well with soil to promote new growth, secure slopes, control erosion and retain moisture -- compost is difficult to sell with shreds of plastic in it, Purman said. The plastic works to the surface and blows around.

One of the area's largest compost users, the Minnesota Department of Transportation, won't touch compost with plastic in it, Black said. "They don't want their roads to look junky."

To address this problem, Dakota County banned use of plastic leaf bags in 1994, requiring residents instead to pack leaves into brown paper bags or reusable containers. In Ramsey County, if residents bring leaves in bags, they must take them home again.

Hennepin County sees the logic in a ban but has not taken that step because bio-degradable bags are expensive and not as widely distributed as plastic, Kroening said.

In the absence of an ordinance, some haulers and compost operators have set their own rules against plastic bags. Dick's Sanitation of Lakeville, like some other private haulers, offer customers a 65-gallon cart for leaf pickup. "They like the convenience of the cart," said David Domack, Dick's vice president for sales and marketing. "They can wheel it around to the back of their garden, and open the lid, and throw everything right in there, and wheel it to the curb when they are done."

Creative leaf transport

At the Maple Grove collection site, which also refuses plastic bags, people get creative with their own vessels to transport leaves.

"Most of the people who come there have their yard waste in a little trailer or in garage cans," said Frank Kampel, Maple Grove recycling coordinator. "But I have seen people put leaves and grass in canoes and boats."

Because no one agency oversees the entire process, no one knows how much of the leaf harvest goes into plastic bags, but it's considerable.

The city of Minneapolis collects leaves in plastic bundles, and it is a key opponent to state legislation banning the bags, said Gardner. The city has a large volume of leaves and argues that "to require residents to go to a certain store to get certain bags at a certain cost would be problematic," Gardner said.

Still, Gardner said he is looking for a way to discourage plastic leaf bags.

"We have a chicken-and-egg problem with the compostable bags," he said. "The price is so off the charts people won't use them, but to get the economies of scale, you need to get everyone to use them."

In any event, ultimately a lot of compost winds up back in plastic bags to be sold at the local garden center.

"For $1.99 or whatever, you can buy your leaves back," Lynde said.

Laurie Blake • 612-673-1711

Laurie Blake • lblake@startribune.com