(Woman raking leaves, man blowing leaves) )
(Woman putting leaves in yard waste bin)
It's really this beautiful story, how we start with a problem
that's contributing to climate change
and contributing to environmental degradation.,
and by doing the right thing with our material,
we're able to create a solution that's helping us
to not only neutralize that problem but actually make it
better.
So, when you your leaves in city of Seattle
and you put them in your yard waste bin,
then you put your bin out
to the street for collection on your collection day,
a hauler will come and take your cart, dump it into their truck.
Then that trust goes to a transfer station.
Where it gets combined
with all of the other, you know, trucks that happen on that day from the city.
The they get loaded into a semi trailer.
And that goes to a commercial composting facility
where it goes through a high heat composting process.
And at the composting facility during that process, it's actually microorganisms.
So it's bacteria and fungi that actually eat the leaves and twigs and food.
Everything that you put, all the organics that get sent to the facility
get broken down through that composting process.
They eat that, and as as they're eating that,
they actually become so active
that it heats the piles of material, these compost
piles, it heats them to be really, really high temperatures.
So if you go to an active composting pile in these facilities
and put your hand in there, it's like too hot to leave it in there!
When organics are collected
and sent to a landfill, those materials degrade.
They're anaerobic, which means without oxygen.
And when that happens, they produce methane gas.
It is 23 times more powerful of a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
However, when the organics, the food and yard waste goes
to a compost facility, they degrade aerobically,
so in the presence of oxygen and they degrade as carbon dioxide.
The end result is compost,
which is this beautiful soil amendment.
And I like to describe it as like a conditioner for your soil,
so it has nutrients,
but it's also full of organic matter, and that helps your soil
to be really fertile and healthy and full of soil life
that can support beautiful, healthy landscapes.