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Gardening Waste Composting at Lehman College

Landscape maintenance of Lehman College’s 37-acre campus produces a LOT of gardening waste. Approximate annual quantities for different streams of gardening waste:

  • Leaves: 35 tons
  • Lawn clippings: 11 tons
  • Tree and shrub branches: 3 tons
  • Wood chips: 2.5 tons

Lehman College has been composting its gardening waste since 1996. Leaves, grass clippings, weeds, and tree branches are added to the compost pile (windrow) and turned at regular intervals (using a payloader/front-end loader) to produce high-quality compost, which is used for gardening on campus. Weed seeds are inactivated by the heat produced by the natural composting process. For many years, Lehman’s extra gardening waste compost had been given away to NYC residents and community gardens through the New York Botanical Gardens.

The main compost site infrastructure was upgraded in 2023. Walls were constructed to contain materials at 3 different ages (un-composted starting materials, partially-composted materials, finished compost) in 3 separate chambers for the most efficient processing of our immense quantities of organic, compostable waste materials.

Gardening Waste Composting links

 

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