New York City wants your leaves and other yard waste

NEW YORK - 'Tis the season for leaves everywhere. And if they're on your property, the city wants them. Each fall, the New York City Department of Sanitation collects some 11,000 tons of leaves that come to a processing facility on Staten Island.

"Your leaves are valuable to us," Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia said. "It would just be sitting in the landfill, it would be decomposing, creating methane and basically polluting the environment."

Leaves and other yard waste and food scraps account for one-third of New York City's garbage. The city's making efforts to get some of that out of the waste stream. The leaves are mixed together at the compost facility into what Garcia calls black gold, which the city sells.

"The food waste has a lot of nitrogen, the leaves have a lot of carbon, and we need the mix," she said.

If you have a green thumb and the outdoor space, you can try shredding leaves with a mower and spreading a layer on your lawn yourself. The state Department of Environmental Conservation offers a composting guide on how to do that.

But chances are, if you're in the city it will be much easier for you to put your leaves in a separate bag (paper is preferred) and take them out with the trash on designated leaf pickup days in November.

"Everything will go through a shredder or grinder first, and all that will get ground up and then put into what we see behind us, what we call windrows," said Brian Fleury for Denali Water Solutions, which runs the city's organic composting.

He gave Fox 5 NY an up-close look at the windrows, which mix up the piles of compost every day for about 90 days as nature works its course.

"The bugs—the natural occurring bugs, the microbes—they are what create the heat," he said. "They are what break down all of the organic matter and create our finished product."

The final product gets stacked up and rebranded Big Apple Compost. Sanitation gives it away for free to many residents and also sells it to landscapers and other businesses.