Management of Leaf Compost ? A Way for Sustainable Development

Chandigarh is a green city which hosts numerous evergreen and deciduous trees with the green cover of 33 %. The Municipal Corporation, the house owners and the residents wanted dried leaves to be removed from the streets and public spaces. The fallen leaves were seen as a waste, a nuisance and burden. The Municipal Corporation collected the dried leaves and dumped them into the truck for landfill site. This was such a short sighted strategy. Leaf litter needed to be treated with much more respect. Leaf litter should not be sent to landfill as well as these should not be burnt but it must be composted. Soil microorganisms like bacteria, cyanobacteria and fungi decomposed organic matter. When key ingredient like moisture, aeration, temperature, pH were given in right condition, the mother nature cooked up a miracle. Leaf composting was simple to manage and produced good quality manure when performed in the campus of Post Graduate College for Girls, Sector-11, Chandigarh, with the help of pure culture of isolated Bacillus sp. , Sacchromyces sp. and Paenibaecillus sp.