What garbage 😖

A letter to the editor in the Spotlight manages to perfectly capture some of what makes Colonie such a frustrating place to live.

The author writes to complain about a change to the policy that requires residents to bag or bundle their yard waste, rather than depositing it in a plastic bin when leaving it on the side of the road for pickup. As the Town explained to a reporter in a recent article in the Times Union, the change in policy was made to reduce on-the-job injuries to the workers who have to lift the yard waste from the roadside into the truck (injuries which have cost the Town more than $1 million over the past few decades). The new policy is in line with what most other local municipalities already do.

But none of that matters to the author, who trots out a complete misunderstanding of the (largely failed) “3 R’s” program to encourage citizens to “Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.” Ignoring the point of the program, he boldly states: “We can’t Reduce the amount of grass clippings from our lawns or the leaves that fall ever year but we can help the environment by reusing the drums we purchased years ago.” I’ll skip over the second part by noting that the point of “Reuse” is that you repurpose things when their initial use case no longer applies, and that I’m sure there are many ways he could re-use his “plastic drums.”

But the statement as a whole sums up the rather toxic attitude of many (most?) of the older generation of Colonie residents, at least in my neighborhood. They all want the golf course-look for their property (never mind that that kind of grass doesn’t grow naturally in the sandy soil of the Albany area). I’ve lived here for a decade and have never once left grass clippings out for pickup by the Town. There are numerous ways people can reduce the amount of grass clippings from their lawns, from composting them, to mowing less frequently (which would be very beneficial to the health of the local ecosystem) to using the mulching configuration that comes standard on every lawn mower, allowing the grass clippings to fertilize the lawn naturally.

Leaves are trickier. We mulch most of ours with the mower, but oak leaves don’t decompose well and have to be collected and mulched separately and then composted. That being said, a leaf mulcher costs about the same as leaf bags would for a couple seasons, and we get free compost out of it.

The better approach would be to do what our neighbors to the south in Bethlehem do, and have the leaves picked up by a vacuum truck. There’s no tedious work of bagging leaves, no heavy lifting for the Town employees. We had the leaf vacuum trucks in my suburb growing up, and it made the work of clearing leaves very easy.

The letter does demonstrate my own big concern about the new policy. I worry that it will encourage many older homeowners, like the author of the letter, to remove trees entirely rather than deal with the hassle of bagging their leaves, and that will impoverish all of us for generations.