Concord residents who got a jump on things by bagging fallen leaves in preparation for the city’s fall pickup will have to do some un-bagging.
Because of budget cuts, the city isn’t picking up bags of leaves this year, as it has done for years in the fall and sometimes in the spring. City crews will be collecting only leaves that have been raked to the curb, where they can be gathered by a machine that looks like a giant snowblower.
Eliminating the bagged leaf pickup for this fall and next spring is expected to save about $100,000, according to City Council discussions.
Leaf collection starts Oct. 26. Details, including maps of where crews will be operating, can be seen on the city website at concordnh.gov/545/Leaf-Collection
A thousand tons of leaves
A lot of leaves fall on city streets: Concord collects at least 1,200 tons of them every autumn and often far more, not including those that residents take directly to the city’s Earth Materials Recycling Center. Gathering them all is surprisingly complicated.
For many years, the city used a giant vacuum cleaner that was unique in the state, but that system was mothballed during COVID because it required too many people to operate. Since 2021, the city’s main collection tool has been a trackless leaf loader, similar to a drivable snowblower; it scrapes up leaves and blows them into a truck.
The leaf loader is less flexible than the vacuum, since it requires homeowners to rake leaves over the edge of the curb, but not too far into the street.
Other complications are timing — the city makes only one pass per season, so if you miss it you’re out of luck — and weather.
Residents may remember problems in 2018, when two November snowstorms froze leaf piles and prevented pickup, snarling the whole process for weeks.
Those complications are why the city has given residents an alternative of putting leaves in compostable bags, which can be picked up as part of regular trash collection. Bagged leaf pickup began in 2018 as an alternative to bulk pickup.
Beyond collection, alternative disposal methods include mulching leaves into the lawn, piling them in a wooded area on your property, bringing them to a local farm that’s accepting them, or dropping them off at the Fort Eddy Road Reprocessing Center, operated by Raymond’s Landscaping. Drop-off is free with proof of residency.
Brush, branches and tree limbs are not accepted in the city’s collection, but the reprocessing center can take them separately for a nominal fee.
