“The leaf collection company for my neighborhood has absurdly strict rules about where leaves must be for pickup,” the Redditor Nillanute4283 wrote in a post that amassed 13k upvotes.

Turns out the author’s property has 40-50 oak trees and two sugar maples, which, in his own words, add up to “leaves. Lots of leaves.” But the leaf company seemed to be oblivious to that fact and did not let the author use a longer curb he shared with the neighbor on which to put that huge amount of leaves.

So the Redditor took it as a challenge and maliciously complied, ending up creating something that became somewhat of a fun sensation in the neighborhood.

A resident with a lot of trees on their property maliciously complies with an “absurdly strict rule” of their leaf-collecting company

Image credits: Alex Sever (not the actual photo)

Image credits: zydeaosika (not the actual photo)

Image credits: Tim Evanson (not the actual photo)

Image credits: nillanute4283

There were so many leaves on the author’s property that they would have burned out his lawn tractor motor

The author of this story later shared an update clarifying some aspects about this whole situation in response to the commentator’s question.

“It’s a lot of leaves and most of them fell within two days. They covered 1/2 acre of land, 3 to 6 inches thick and I could see no grass. Attempting to mow/mulch them would have burned out my lawn tractor motor. Even mulched, I think they would result in a significant layer that would suffocate the grass before they could break down to feed it. I might try mulching next year, though.”

The OP indeed paid the neighbors for their leaves so he could “legitimately claim the leaves to be his”

Image credits: RODNAE Productions (not the actual photo)

The Redditor explained that he paid the neighbors “so that I could legitimately claim the leaves to be mine” and added that “to be fair, they thought I was mental.”

“This is something I did so I could meet the letter of the law that only ‘my’ leaves were in the pile. In case you were confused like others were, I paid $1 to each neighbor (3 of them), not $1 for each leaf. Since this whole game was inspired by this subreddit, I wanted to make sure I fully met the ‘compliance’ requirements.”

Apparently, the leaf pickup companies exist as a solution to leaf burning which is banned in his county

The author was also asked how a company exists to pick leaves up: “Like there is that many people they can make a living off this, are these leaves like, dangerous?” someone wondered.

The OP responded by saying that the danger is leaf burning. “The swanky neighborhoods in the county (a district approximately 480 square miles (774 sq km) in area) includes over 33000 homes outside the limits of the established cities. There’s still a lot of farmland in this part of the U.S. To maintain lawns (in many cases, lawn standards are enforced by neighborhood associations called Home Owners Associations or HOAs), leaves are raked / blown / gathered, but most individual home owners have nowhere to put them.”

In the past, “hospital visits would skyrocket,” because of the smoke from leaf burning

Image credits: Eva Bronzini (not the actual photo)

Moreover, according to the author, “they used to burn the leaves, but it would result in a smoke haze that would last weeks and trigger every asthmatic. Hospital visits would skyrocket. Even before all the respiratory complications with Covid, the county had banned leaf burning.”

“Since they banned burning, though, they had to provide an alternative. They chose to contract with the largest lawn service company in the area, who used the contract to build up a fleet of leaf collection trucks. They collect leaves in the fall and the spring. I don’t know if those trucks get used in the winter and summer,” the author explained.

“I conceived the plan with the full intent to make it into a story I could post on r/MaliciousCompliance,” the author told us

Bored Panda managed to reach out to the author of this story and get some more information about what happened. The Redditor told us that from the very beginning, he “conceived the plan with the full intent to make it into a story I could post on r/MaliciousCompliance on Reddit.”

“To achieve that, I had to figure out how to be both malicious and compliant. Since it would be non-compliant to just add my neighbors’ leaves to my pile, I had to devise a way for them to, technically, be my leaves,” he explained. The author added that the easiest way to do so was to buy them from his neighbors.

It turns out the author is far from the only one who is tired of the deeds of the leaf collection company

“My neighbors are all pretty fed up with the shenanigans of the leaf collection company. My immediate neighbors were, of course, aware of what I was doing since I paid them for their leaves. They also know me well enough to not be surprised by my doing something this passive-aggressive.”

The author also explained that this leaf collection company is contracted by and subsidized through the county. “But they are excessively paranoid about people ‘stealing’ their services.”

“The cities near where I live have separate leaf collection contracts that everyone receives as city services. Because I live outside any city limits in the unincorporated parts of the county, a separate contractor is used,” he explained.

“If they were smart, they’d turn it into compost and sell it back to us for more money”

We also wondered where the leaves are transported to. It turns out they are brought to a nearby former farm that was purchased by the county.

“It’s about 150 acres, part of which is used for leaf dumping. If they were smart, they’d turn it into compost and sell it back to us for more money, but I haven’t seen that level of crafty intelligence from them yet.”

In the end, sadly, not everything came out as positive from this story

The author said that apart from a good story, his efforts also had a serious downside. “It gained me a torn rotator cuff from creating and maintaining that huge pile of leaves. I’m currently recovering from the surgery to repair the damage. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t worth it,” the author concluded.

The author was happy to answer some more questions in the comments

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