In my day job working as a writer for municipal government, I’ve learned a lot about systems and processes that I knew hardly anything about before, especially the environmental stuff. Like water systems. And landfills. Ever given two seconds of thought to your nearest landfill, or to any landfill for that matter? I never did much…it’s basically a gigantic, layered earthen graveyard for our trash. The U.S. has more than 1,200 active landfills (and more than 10,000 inactive ones), to which large trucks travel back and forth every day, dropping off said trash. We basically bury our trash in the Earth, hoping we are long dead and gone before it really becomes a problem. There are four in my county alone, one for every 218 square miles, strategically built and landscaped so you may not realize you are driving past one when you do. Anyway, I’ve learned that the average U.S. homeowner sends about six and a half tons of grass clippings, leaves and other yard waste, in non-compostable plastic bags, to the landfill every year, so much that cities often use their communications outreach to encourage more earth-friendly yard practices, such as using compostable paper lawn and leaf bags (the city I work for even offers to pick up the paper yard bags, curbside, once a week, in a big truck that also picks up tree limbs—the yard waste is converted into mulch and compost at a regional facility shared by many cities, and sold to residents at a discount as well as used in city landscaping).

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My husband, our family’s resident “yard guy,” decided to give paper lawn and leaf bags a try six years ago when I first wrote about the bags for the city, and he has been using them ever since. The 30-gallon bags are available at most big-box home improvement stores, like Home Depot, as well as stores like Target and Walmart, and range in price from around $2 for five bags to $5.69 for 12 to $26.75 for 50. (That’s more than twice the price of the plastic alternative—yes, sadly, in this instance as with many earth-friendly practices, you have to be willing/able to pay extra.) A reusable bag stand/chute, priced at around $10 and often available for purchase where the bags are sold, makes filling them easier because even though the bags are sometimes advertised as “self-standing,” that’s not always true.

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We like the fact that all our leaves and grass clippings are being turned into mulch and compost at the regional composting facility (we’ve visited it and purchased the discounted mulch for our own landscaping—when you buy in bulk it’s significantly cheaper than at retail garden centers) and appreciate that our city, along with the one where I work, are part of the same program, and it frustrates me that more people don’t take advantage of it. I realize that people who hire lawn services don’t usually have a choice in bags, but wondering that if more lawn services used them, if the bag price would come down for all of us…

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But– there’s another smart lawn practice that cities promote that eliminates bags– plastic AND paper– completely, which my husband and I hadn’t given much attention to until very recently: mulch mowing, a.k.a. “grasscycling”. The grass clippings are “left to lie”, to break down and provide the soil with vital nutrients. I’ll admit I thought, when I first heard about it, “Ew, who wants to leave grass clippings all over their yard?!” but then found out that’s how my city mows all their parks, and realized that the parks are all beautiful, so…why wouldn’t my yard be, too? I did some research, and, if you use a mulch mower or get a mulching attachment for a regular mower, the grass clippings are short enough that they fall down amidst existing grass, decomposing quickly where you can’t see them and even providing a bit of moisture. So not only do you eliminate bags (and the time/labor spent filling those bags), mulch mowing reduces fertilizer use and chemical runoff into streams and lakes.

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I looked more into mulch mowing.  All sorts of information is available online, including YouTube videos, that debate the merits of “bagging vs. mulching” …it’s definitely worth learning how to do it right if you’re going to mulch mow, because, for example, if you wait too long between mowings, it can cause “thatch” issues with your yard; the grass gets too long to be clipped into the proper, “disappearing” length. My husband looked at the videos, and was interested, too. And then, OF COURSE, he tells me that our current, regular mower has a mulching option on it…what? Dual option mowers? Yes, it turns out they are pretty common. With ours, if you simply take the bag off when mowing, it automatically shuts a “door” to the bag and forces the grass clippings to pass through the regular blades more than once, chopping them into teeny, tiny pieces. (And, that mower was only $80, bought through local, secondhand shopping, of course 🙂 )

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Bottom line, now that he’s tried it, there are certain times he prefers to mulch mow (when there aren’t a lot of leaves on the grass) and at other times, he mows “the old way,” with an attached mower bag, when he can mow over grass and leaves at the same time and dump the mower’s bag contents into the paper lawn and leaf bags. Since starting, there haven’t been a lot of “no-leaf” opportunities to mulch mow but when he did, he liked it, and is looking forward to a long stretch of easy mulch mowing coming up now that major spring lawn “make-ready,” is tapering off.  I mean, who wouldn’t like it? You just mow—and go. No time spent bagging, no time or cost spent on acquiring bags…think of how many more lawns those lawn services could squeeze in each day if they skipped the bagging, too! Think about how many bags going to the landfill would be saved. And, if mulch mowing also saves on lawn fertilizing and makes it healthier overall…and if the practice reduces the expense of buying a lot of bags, and saves time and labor, might it bring down the cost of a lawn service overall?

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Definitely some questions for our perfect-lawn-obsessed culture to think about. How much more perfect those lawns would be if the grass (and leaves) were truly reused and returned to “where they came from.”

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Please leave a comment and let me know your thoughts on this— have you previously known about mulch mowing and have you ever tried it? Does your city participate in a “turn yard waste into compost/mulch” program? And, even if your city doesn’t collect paper lawn and leaf bags, wondering if anyone would ever consider buying them/using them simply because the bags wouldn’t hang around inside a landfill taking up space as long as the other junk…