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The National Wildlife Federation just gave your teenager the perfect excuse to not rake the leaves in your yard this year. Apparently it kills the environment.
They posted an article on their website in September called “Why You Should Leave the Leaves”. And now it’s going viral.
Basically, leaves create mini ecosystems, and they’re used as shelter, food, and nesting material for things like birds, chipmunks, and butterflies.
Also, roughly 33 million tons of leaves and other debris from yards end up in landfills each year. And when they’re bagged up, they don’t get enough oxygen to decompose, and the methane they create contributes to climate change.
Not raking them up can kill your grass though. So if you’re worried about your yard, they say to turn them into compost, or go over them with a mulching mower so they’ll be absorbed back into the soil.
You’d still effectively be rendering helpless chipmunks and butterflies homeless that way though. So another suggestion they came up with is to use them with sticks to build shelters for small animals to live in.
