I blow them back onto the lawn. With a leaf blower.

Unless you are blowing leaves, clippings, etc onto your own lawn, you are blowing them onto someone else's property. This is fairly rude imho. As much as I love clippings, I don't want all the disease and unknown herbicides that come along with it from my neighbors. Most of the lawn care guys around here know that they will be replaced if a neighbor complains about blowing. Those of us who do our own lawns respect each other enough to put the stuff back into our own lawns or in the green waste collection.

For hedge trimming I lay out a 50 ft long plastic painter's tarp ($!0 from Home Depot). It catches everything and makes the job very easy to clean up.

Where I am in georgia it is illegal to blow clippings into the street. Blow it back onto your yard.

Hmm, glad to hear some sensible comments. I am amazed how often I see people, as I'm driving down the street, blowing their leaves out into the road or into their neighbors' yards. In fact, a couple days ago the gardener working for our neighbor was out by my mailbox blowing the leaves out into the street. I asked him who he thought was going to take care of all the leaves he blew into the yard, and he just shrugged. I mentioned that he could blow them into a pile and dispose of them correctly, and also reminded him (again) that I really don't appreciate it when I see him and the other workers blowing the leaves into our yard. He replied, "You'll have to take it up with the boss. All the leaves that we blow into your yard are from your trees." Not only is the last statement untrue, but it wouldn't matter anyway. You don't just blow them from one yard or planting bed into another! Guess it's time to bring it up with the neighbors. They have had a lot of health issues lately, and I haven't wanted to bother them. But his nonchalance about simply blowing the yard debris away from their yard and calling it done really irritates me.

Thanks for the comments. That's what I thought, but with so many different ways of doing it, I wasn't sure what was ettiquette/standard practice.

I was looking out my side window one day watching our neighbor's
gardener literally blowing all the leaves away from his side property
right onto mine, all the way up to my house. I'm talking large amounts
of leaves. I was pissed and when all was said and done my yard was
spotless. That was a few years ago when I didn't understand how
valuable leaves are for your soil. I now ask them to blow leaves back
to my yard. LOL

Mowing so you blow the grass clippings into the street is one of my gripes. I don't know how many times I have seen someone mowing their yard and the road covered with grass. This is completely unnecessary, unless you want your neighbors to know you finally got around to mowed your yard.

They could keep the street clean and make no work for themselves by reversing the mowing direction. I start mowing at the street and blow the clippings into the yard. With the lawn mower you have a large "Leaf blower" so any grass that does get into the street can be quickly blown back into the yard with one pass of the mower at the edge of the street.

Maybe the problem is caused by State laws (walk on the side facing traffic, etc.) and mower design. If it is then mower designers could easily switch the discharge to the opposite side of the mower deck and solve the problem.

Personally I am to cheap to give my grass clippings away. I want every bit of grass in my yard building up the soil. In fact I have been tempted to ask the neighbors who bag their grass for the clippings for some poor areas of my lawn. While I don't have a means of transporting them I am so envious of the piles of leaves in my daughter's neighborhood, as I never have enough leaves for my flower bed.

As for blowing leaves into the Street. In some areas that is perfectly acceptable at some times during the year as there is a city pickup of the leaves. Maybe they did not understand the pickup rules.