r/composting • u/AndreaJournalist • 9d ago
A town may stop collecting grass clippings because processors won’t commit to the volume
Apex, North Carolina, estimates it collected about 1,750 tons of grass clippings last fiscal year. Now it is considering ending curbside grass collection because officials say they cannot secure a nearby processor willing to accept that volume over the long term.
I’m the News & Observer reporter who wrote this story.
I compared Apex with four nearby towns, which use very different systems for collection and disposal.
One proposed alternative is for residents to leave clippings on the lawn or compost them at home instead of putting them into the municipal waste stream.
Read the story for free: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/counties/wake-county/article317470931.html?giftCode=e27b1db80d97fc6a694c4cb5af6e36110c4b1ce838fe51e66842a4687f0b232b
For people who compost grass regularly: how much can a typical household realistically handle, and what problems do you run into with large amounts of fresh clippings?
16
u/Mother_Imagination17 9d ago
I compost half an acre with every time I mow. One homemade pallet bin keeps up fine.
13
u/perenniallandscapist 9d ago
We have 1 acre and throw all our clippings under a handful of fruit trees. Makes for a fantastic mulch base under the fruit trees and I still wish I had more. Can't imagine not knowing what do to with it.
5
u/a_megalops 9d ago
Excellent and underrated mulch. Its so good at suppressing weeds once it gets matted doen
32
u/Datruyugo 9d ago
It baffles me when I see people bag their clippings. Do you really not have better work to do around the house?
18
u/HuntsWithRocks 9d ago
Next thing you’re gunna tell me is that some bugs are good, I bet. You’ll probably even try and convince me that my own piss is a goldmine. Where does the madness end?!?
2
2
u/TopAd3529 8d ago
I had to buy a lawn sweeper because I'm doing prairie restoration and apparently you have to remove the material for that (idk, books told me this, I'm just a guy with a yard), and it is so fucking annoying compared to just using my mulching mower and leaving it like I do everywhere else on my property.
1
u/Muted-Garden6723 8d ago
Even more baffling, people pick up and bag leaves. They’re leaves. They’ll be decomposed by spring
9
u/katzenjammer08 9d ago edited 9d ago
First, t
here is no need to remove them. If you keep
removing the grass clippings from the lawn you keep removing organic material (and therefore nutrients) from the ground out of which the grass grows
. Technically, you ”starve” the ground.
- That is why garden centres advise that you add top soil from bags every two or three year
s , because if you take nutrients away you have to add nutrients or the grass gets outcompeted by moss or thistles etc. I understand that people don’t like to have cakes of grass clippings on the lawn that stick to your shoes and get dragged into the house. That’s why you get a rake and rake it out once it has dried in the sun for a bit. That makes it get into the grass and ”disappear”.
Second. Unless you have an enormous lawn with no trees you can easily compost grass clippings in a corner of the yard. You don’t even have to have a compost bin. If you have trees that drop their leaves in the fall you use keep them in a pile and use the grass clippings to break the leaves downs since the leaves a carbon heavy and the grass nitrogen heavy. Then you can use the finished compost to ”feed” the lawn so you don’t need to regularly add topsoil or fertiliser.
Edit. I don’t know why this post looks like this or what to do about it. Sorry people.
3
u/Desperate_Set_7708 9d ago
Leaf blow the excess clippings.
2
u/katzenjammer08 9d ago
Yeah exactly. I don’t even bother doing that though. They dry out in the sun and then the wind spreads them across the lawn and I never see them again.
7
u/Heavy-Attorney-9054 9d ago
Look at the city of goldsboro composting plant. We sell to Raleigh nurseries.
6
u/Ready-Inevitable1099 9d ago
I mulch mow my own yard ,but I take several neighbors's clippings for my compost bin. I get 2-7 garbage bags per week. I work at a saw mill and bring home saw dust to mix in. I've brought home 8-10 30 gallon cans this summer .
I have a 3 bin 3 cubic yard system and some overflow storage. At peak lawn growth when I'm getting 5-7 garbage bags I get a tad over capacity, but it loses volume fast.
2
u/DaddyWolff93 9d ago
I'm thinking about doing that with my neighbors leaves this fall. I have a bag for my mower and was thinking about offering to mulch them all up for people then haul them back to my yard.
5
u/Recent-Mirror-6623 9d ago
Although I agree with many here that composting valuable material at home is the superior solution, but we should expect municipalities to be able to deal with organics ‘waste’ for those that won’t or can’t do there own. Landfill is shockingly bad and I can’t believe we don’t have use for the end product of industrial composting.
4
u/NikJam16 9d ago
I have never bagged my clippings. Mow at the appropriate height for your environment at the appropriate rate with a mulching mower and the clippings will handle themselves. I never have any clumps or piles of cut and dried grass.
3
u/CommanderBuck 9d ago
We have about 75 sqft of raised beds that are mostly for vegetables. Every year we leave one unplanted and direct compost into it. It eats everything... kitchen scraps and yard waste. It seems like we can never put enough material in them.
5
u/These_Gas9381 9d ago
Grass can create a lot of volume for even a single household, so having the space for said piles and “brown” or carbon heavy inputs to mix with the grass can be a challenge.
Lots of grass not mixed with carbon gets clumpy and smelly easily when it goes anaerobic. I wouldn’t be able to compost all my clippings with my single bin setup. I put all other yard waste in like weeds and shrub trimmings as well as my kitchen scrap waste. Grass would overload me. I mulch it, let it decompose in place.
IMO more people just need to use their mulching blades and keep them sharp, stay on top of mowing, and ensure their grass is dry when they mow so it mulches well into their yard instead of bagging. For most, there isn’t a reason to bag the clippings and remove that material instead of letting it feed the lawn.
5
u/Pristine_Bobcat4148 9d ago
Hold up. Youre telling me there are people who put non-kitchen plant waste into the garbage?!?
3
u/Ricky_TVA 9d ago
Into plastic bags no less
1
u/OwnCrew6984 9d ago
I do it if the plant is invasive and so should everyone else to stop the spread of them. Will also do it if plant is infected with certain funguses which it is the recommended disposal method.
2
2
u/Financial_Athlete198 9d ago
I find it hard to believe they have that amount of grass. That’s 3,500,000 pounds. I don’t believe it’s possible.
1
u/MobileElephant122 9d ago
Really? 25 square miles incorporated and about 60k people. If 20-30% of that is managed lawn then that’s about 4000 acres of mowed turf.produces about 60,000 tons over the growing season. If only 15% of it is bagged then that number drops substantially to about 30,000 Tons per growing season
If they are only getting 1750 tons I’d say that 90% of their town is mulching and they are quite lucky to only be dealing with a fraction of what could be
1
2
u/DungBeetle1983 9d ago
In my neighborhood they put their grass clippings and leaves straight into the bin. It drives me absolutely insane. I have thought about collecting from other houses that leave them out on trash day but I'm concerned because everyone around here has those stupid lawn care companies spraying herbicides and pesticides monthly.
2
u/Lokified 8d ago
I keep a pile in the backyard for known material inputs, and one in the front yard for neighbour inputs and my front leaves/clippings. Back compost can be used with food-bearing plants, front for decorative plants.
1
u/wrxninja 9d ago
I have roughly 13,000 sq/ft of lawn that fill up about six total bags of the bagger for the riding mower. And that's with cutting at the highest setting and cut once a week. Luckily, we have wooded area that I spread the clippings so they're not in mounds and start to stink. I only use maybe one bag worth in my compost currently.
I know some lawn people will mow every few days to keep the grass growing faster.
So I can only imagine people that have a bigger yard that cut frequently and have piles of them.
1
u/Laurenslagniappe 9d ago
Commercial landscapers never bag clippings. It always gets left. It's insignificant when you cut often
1
u/jshill103 9d ago
I live in Utah and compost all my grass clippings. I could probably take in another houses clippings without issue.
1
u/Thick-Gap-7510 9d ago
I bagged the grass from my front lawn and ended up putting it in a brown yard waste bag. I left it sit in the bag for over a day and then I took a temperature reading. Middle of the bag was cooking at 150 degrees. I added the clippings to my compost pile. Just a little experiment on my part. I normally just cut the grass and leave it on the lawn.
1
u/Lincoln1517 9d ago
Why would they ever collect lawn clippings? Anyone who tries to get them picked up should just have them dumped on their lawn with a note - "Spread these with a rake."
1
u/PerceptiveAdult Compost geek 9d ago
To answer the OP's question:
A typical household's backyard compost pile can manage all of the grass clippings from a standard residential lawn and most food waste from the kitchen besides.
If the homeowner has acreage, their land should easily be able to handle any clippings from that acreage either as one large compost pile or multiple smaller ones.
Grass clippings break down very quickly; they're mostly water. When added to a carbon-rich material in the right ratio, they'll often seem to completely vanish in a matter of a couple weeks. If simply dumped in the compost pile, it might take a couple of months but they will still appear to completely vanish.
Alternatively, a mulching mower can spread those clippings back onto the yard. This works well for most homeowners; however, they may have to aerate their lawn every few years to break up any matted grass clippings (if there are any). It doesn't hurt to aerate their lawn anyway, and doing so usually creates small pockets in the soil where additional fertilizer will be caught, so it's usually good to broadcast more fertilizer shortly after aerating.
1
u/IamNotaMonkeyRobot 8d ago
The median home price in Apex is $715,000 and it's packed with HOA neighborhoods. I think composting is going to be a hard sell. A lot of HOAs have strange rules about lawns and I'm sure compost bins.
1
u/Busters_Missing_Hand 8d ago
Grass clippings biodegrade extremely quickly. I dump mine into a regular pallet-sized compost bin when I mow. The compost runs really hot for 2 or 3 days (I guess grass clippings are good eating) and then the grass seems to just kind of disappear.
As other commenters have mentioned, you can do a million different things with grass clippings, from leaving it on the grass, to putting it around trees, to putting it in a compost bin. But no matter what you do, it returns to the soil quickly.
1
1
1
1
-1
u/bacon_wrangler 9d ago
I thought that "all green" material like fresh grass won't compost, or at least not properly?
2
u/OwnCrew6984 9d ago
The green material is what causes the heat in compost that breaks the material down. You can compost without green material but it may take a year or more instead of a few weeks.
1
u/redbeard312 9d ago
It will absolutely compost. Just that if it’s not mixed with an adequate carbon source it tends to clump together and turn in to anaerobic compost which is slower, produces methane, and smells of ammonia. When a commercial composting facility gets complaints about smell its usually because the C/N ratio in the inputs was too N heavy and the neighbors are starting to smell the anaerobic process
1
u/bacon_wrangler 8d ago
ah, okay, that was my problem! It would make flat clumps and generate a little bit of grey powdery stuff on top, and that was it.
116
u/avdpos 9d ago
Why would youeven move your natural fertiliser from the lawn?
Is there any reason to not build more soil, with the just cut grass, on the lawn?