As fall progresses, my garden offers winter squash, cranberries, sweet potatoes, and Swiss chard, all colorful and nutritious food that will sustain my family into winter. There are some other less obvious fall nutrients out there in the form of tree trimmings, leaves, and annuals and perennials gone by. These are, or will be, nutrients for plants when spring arrives.

Yard trimmings are no small potatoes when it comes to municipal solid waste. In 2007 they accounted for 12.8% or 32.6 million tons of the municipal solid waste stream. Thankfully, municipalities composted 20.9 tons of yard trimmings, yielding an overall relatively high recovery rate of 64.1%. Only recovery (recycling) of car batteries and steel cans was higher. Still, this means 11.7 million tons of leaves went to landfills, removed from the biological cycle they’d been part of for millions of years.

Each fall, my husband trims trees and gathers leaves and considers bringing them to our municipal waste facility for composting. This is when my hoarding instinct kicks in. Please don’t take those nutrients away, I beg. So, the tree limbs go into the woods (many animals will make a home out of a pile of tree trimmings) and the leaves join the garden and barn waste in a big glorious fall compost pile.

Bringing our yard waste to the municipal facility for composting would relocate some of the nutrient content from our yard to some other place (the yard of whoever uses the compost made by our municipality). That is probably just fine for people who aren’t so passionate about plants, but when leaves are deposited in a landfill their nutrients are removed for good. This is the same for food scraps, which account for 12.5% of municipal solid waste. Sadly, food scraps experience a much lower nutrient recovery rate of 2.6%. As soils are depleted around the world, we continue to lose nutrients to landfills. In that environment they no longer have the opportunity to support plant growth.

When I was growing up and refusing my dinner, my mother would say “Don’t waste your food — other people in the world are starving. My kids hear that too, but they also hear “Don’t waste your organic nutrients — soils all over are becoming less fertile”.

It is time for a shift in our perspective. Instead of seeing food scraps and yard trimmings as waste, let’s see them for what they really are — nutrients for plants. If Halloween treats are the nutrients you think of this time of year, consider upcycling (making new stuff from would-be waste) any Mars brand candy wrappers you get in your trick-or-treat bag. Chocolate is a nutrient, I’m pretty sure, and it turns out the wrapper can be too.