What to do with Wood Waste - Secondary Life for Wood Products

Lou Meyer, business developer for Davey's mid-Atlantic region,  talks about how Davey arborist deal with wood wastes and different ways to give wood a secondary life.

In this episode we cover:  

• Where does wood waste go? (3:37)
• Composting wood (5:19)
• Unique ways to use wood waste (6:07)
• Can homeowners keep their wood waste? (6:34)
• Biochar (7:42)
• Ways to use wood chips (12:55)
• Potential concerns of wood chips(14:00)
• Secondary life for larger wood waste (16:18)
• Unique wood types (19:04)
• Leaving wood on site vs recycling wood waste (20:38)
•  Wildlife snags (22:25)

To learn more about biochar, read this blog.

To learn how you can live a more sustainable life beyond giving wood waste a secondary life, read this blog.

To find your local Davey office, check out our find a local office page to search by zip code.  

To learn more about 

Connect with Davey Tree on social media:
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Facebook: @DaveyTree
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YouTube: The Davey Tree Expert Company
LinkedIn: The Davey Tree Expert Company 

Connect with Doug Oster at www.dougoster.com. 

Have topics you'd like us to cover on the podcast? Email us at podcasts@davey.com. We want to hear from you!    

Transcript

Doug Oster: Welcome to the Davey Tree Expert Company's podcast, Talking Trees. I'm your host, Doug Oster. Each week, our expert arborists share advice on seasonal tree care, how to make your trees thrive, arborists' favorite trees, and much, much more. Tune in every Thursday to learn more because here at the Talking Trees podcast, we know trees are the answer. I'm joined again this week by my friend, Lou Meyer. We've talked a lot on the podcast before. He's business developer for Davey's Mid-Atlantic region. Today we're talking all about what to do with wood waste. How are you doing, Lou?

Lou Meyer: Doug, I'm doing great. It's always a pleasure to be here with you. Things here in Maryland are where the sun is shining and the grass is green.

Doug: It's rainy in Pittsburgh and we're grateful to have the rain so we don't have to water.

Lou: Indeed.

Doug: Okay, so this is a topic we've never touched on in the podcast before and something I didn't think about. Where does all the wood go that you're cutting and chipping and all that?

Lou: Yes, our industry produces a tremendous amount of debris. We'll focus mainly on the tree side of things. Landscape also creates quite a bit of debris, soil, and other things. When it comes to tree work, we're talking about trees and limbs being removed. We generally break that debris into two categories. One is brush, so anything that cannot be chipped. Most of our chippers in the field, you can feed 12 to 15 inches in. Now, they go up to 18 to 21-inch chippers. You could feed a pretty large tree through a chipper, but that's more used in the forestry realm.

For urban forestry, 12 to 15 inches is pretty typical. Anything over that amount, you can't feed into a chipper so you've got all this wood sitting around. Yes, you think of your average chip truck holds about nine yards of material. A yard is a cubic yard, 3 foot by 3 foot by 3 foot, so an average-size pickup truck bed is about a yard. You think nine yards you create. Davey office has three chip trucks going out every day so they're creating 27 yards. We have 100 offices around the country, 100 plus, so 2,700 yards of mulch. That's 2,700 pickup truck loads worth of chip mulch so just an astronomical amount of material that we're producing.

Yes, so when you chip the wood, anything under that 15-inch or so threshold, it goes through the chipper. These are the small branches, leaves, all that stuff. It comes out the other end in small pieces, wood chips. It's not quite mulch. Some people think, oh, it's mulch coming out of the end of there, and it's not. You can use wood chips as mulch. Don't ever use fresh wood chips in a vegetable garden though. Wood chips will strip the soil of nitrogen. You need to either age them or go for different types of mulch.

To create mulch, and that's one of the things that we do, you have to run those wood chips through something called a tub grinder, which is this primeval machine. This giant rotating drum with teeth that just pound the bejesus out of this wood material and it could break down very large pieces into small. You do that two or three times if you want double-shredded mulch, it's means it's gone through one of these tub grinders twice, triple-shredded mulch is three times.

Doug: With all those wood chips, are you bringing those, in general, do they bring them back to the office and have a yard for them, or where do they go?

Lou: Different operations do it differently. Some of our operations are in city centers and they have small lots. They have nowhere to dump the chips. Those groups usually have recycling centers that they go to. Recycling is mulch. We're recycling wood chips into mulch. A lot of times landscape operations have that as a secondary revenue stream where you're a large landscape company in say, Cincinnati, where I'm familiar with. There's a large landscape company on the east side of town that we pay to dump our wood chips at. They grind it into mulch and then they use it in their operations, but they also sell it bagged.

Now Davey does this in three markets. In Minneapolis, Chicago, and Atlanta, we have mulch operations that we own. Large yards where we dump debris and other companies do too. That mulch that is produced goes to wholesalers. If you think of when you go to like Home Depot and you buy, I don't know, Scott's Mulch or something like that, there's a chance that that is Davey mulch that's being produced. We don't sell it under our banner. We only sell to wholesalers. Again, Minneapolis, Chicago, and Atlanta have that opportunity. They go into recycling centers is what I was saying. Some of the operations do have large enough yards where they'll bring wood chips back. They'll dump them at the end of the day, and when business is slow or on rain days, we'll run those wood chips to recycling centers or other places. Yes.

Doug: Would wood chips, if you just left a big pile of them somewhere, would they eventually decompose into compost? I know it would take a long time, but that's what it would become, right?

Lou: It would take a long time and you would be wanting to mix in organic matter as well to really make compost. There's actually, going back to Cincinnati again, there was a compost facility that was started years ago. I don't know if it's still running, but we would dump wood chips there and then the local produce companies would dump wasted produce there, produce that is spoiled. You'd have these truck fulls of tomatoes being dumped at the same time as trucks full of wood chips, and they'd be mixing it up. It smelled awful, but it was a great idea.

There's also other inventive ways to do things. Out in San Francisco, our San Francisco Bay office has actually dropped their wood chips off at a local waste energy facility and it's used as biomass for electric generators. Instead of burning coal or natural gas, they're actually burning biomass to turn the turbines in the electrical generators. We're contributing to that, which is cool.

Doug: If I had Davey on my property doing work and they were chipping, would they leave me the chips?

Lou: Absolutely, yes. Yes, we pay to dump our chips for the most part. Any chance that we find to drop them off at homeowners' places. Here in Maryland, I have a whole network of homeowners that I know that want wood chips. Farms, a lot of times, are looking for wood chips. A lot of parks too. Here in Baltimore, just west of Baltimore, the neighbor spaces of Baltimore County is a group that has urban parks that they manage. They're always looking for wood chips to spread for weed suppression. There's a website called Chip Drop. It's an app that helps homeowners connect with tree companies to drop off chips. It's user-friendliness is somewhat spotty. I haven't had a tremendous amount of success using it as a wood chip creator but that is out there, so there's that.

One of the other exciting things that Davey is getting into, and I am allowed to talk about this now, is that Biochar is a product that's coming online with Davey. Biochar is a product that is charcoal that is created in a kiln with oxygen removed so that a maximum amount, you burn organic material and a maximum amount of charcoal is created. It's actually a very low emissions. It's not like having a campfire where you're creating charcoal but releasing a tremendous amount of carbon into the air through smoke. This is a fairly low to almost non-existent emissions.

Our Chicago market is going to be the first one to trial that. We're going to be able to feed 30,000 cubic yards of biomass annually into the kiln. That's going to create about 7,500 cubic yards of Biochar. About a one to four. You put in four yards of material, you get one yard of Biochar coming out of that.

Doug: When you say biomass, what does that mean? Does that mean wood chips, leaves, or just wood chips, or what is it?

Lou: Yes, wood chips or leaves, anything biological. Yes, so wood chips or leaves. There's Biochar that's made out of coconut shells. There's all sorts of different kinds. You can make it out of almost anything that's organic. You can then use that, the Biochar, either in plantings. It doesn't have any nutrient makeup. This is an entirely different podcast altogether on what is Biochar. Just briefly, it doesn't have any nutrient makeup but it has a very unique cation exchange capacity that allows ions to bond to it, molecules to bond to it. When you put Biochar in the soil, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and other micronutrients will bond to it and stay in the soil for much longer. Water molecules will bond to it and stay in the soil much longer to allow those to be taken up by the plant more efficiently and not to have as much runoff, all sorts of things like that.

Doug: We have touched on Biochar on the podcast several times. Have you ever had an opportunity to use it in your plantings over the years?

Lou: Yes, I use it in plantings and then I use it a lot as a top dressing for turf care as well. When we do our aerification overseeding, we like to put down a top dressing of biochar. Again, I'm in Maryland and the soils out here are very sandy because we're closer to the beach, closer to the ocean and that biochar helps to build up a better soil composition. Again, because sand allows water and nutrients to flow through it a lot faster because of its larger pieces, we don't have as much clay as the Midwest does so that biochar helps to bond to these molecules. They don't wash out as easy. Mixing it in with clay is also good too. It helps build that soil structure.

Doug: What does it look like? Is it like pulverized powder or is it bigger pieces or could it be either?

Lou: It comes in different grades. You could buy it in chunks where, yes, it looks almost like charcoal briquettes, not in the shape of charcoal briquettes, but more the natural kind, and then down to powder. I buy it pelletized so it can go through a lawn spreader. That's how I use it, but the powder kind is great for mixing in with plantings. Again, as a soil amendment, more or less.

There's a liquid form that has suspended in a liquid, and we're using that in our subsurface fertilizer application. Arbor Green Pro is our patented plant food, and that is injected into the soil, 8 to 10 inches below ground in a probe suspended in a liquid. It's a powdered fertilizer suspended in a liquid. We can mix in liquid biochar into that blend and it doesn't gum up our machines. You could be putting biochar into the root systems of the trees themselves.

Doug: That's fascinating. Like I said, I've danced around it on the podcast and I've had people give me biochar before, but all I hear is positive things from every arborist. Everyone in Davey that I talk to says biochar is great. We, as consumers, we don't see it out there. We don't see biochar out there.

Lou: Right. Again, this is an entire podcast on its own, but it's been around for thousands of years. The indigenous folks of South America would burn their fields at the end of the season so that they would turn to charcoal. From that charcoal, a new field would rise again. It's one of the oldest forms of soil amendments going back thousands and thousands of years, and it stays in its form for up to 5,000 years, so you get a long shelf life on it. 3,000 to 5,000 years of use. It'll outlive all of us.

We talk about carbon sequestration is a hot word right now, and this is a great way to sequester carbon into this material, put it underground to store, and put it to work for you in the garden or in your landscape.

Doug: Back to wood waste. Anything else as far as wood chips are concerned? Well, I used to get wood chips delivered and I'd put them in my paths in the garden, but I found that I couldn't walk barefoot in the paths anymore because the wood chips were so sharp. How are people using wood chips? Like you said, weed control. That's a great thing. Just keep dumping wood chips on top, you'll win the battle on the weeds.

Lou: Yes, we're doing that. We've looked into companies that make silt socks. They stuff those with wood chips, so along the edge of construction sites, for instance. They stuff those with wood chips to keep the runoff from going out. It's almost like a filter. We've looked into doing that. We've also looked into pelletizers for wood stoves. When you go to a hardware store and you see the pellets for wood stoves, those generally come from wood chips. There are different depots around the country that they make those at. We haven't had success really connecting with it, trying to figure out how to make it worth the trouble but that's definitely an option down the way.

Doug: Is there anything as a consumer I should worry about if I'm getting wood chips from a company? Could there be anything in there that would be a negative for my garden or for my environment?

Lou: Well, it depends if the company you're buying it from has a good policy of keeping them clean. It's pretty easy for tree crews to, and I don't like seeing this, I have seen it, to throw an empty Gatorade bottle in the back of the truck. We try and police it as much as possible. At Davey, we discuss this with our crews constantly of, hey, we're a public-facing company and trash goes in the trash can. If you go to any chip recycling center and you see piles of chips with garbage in it, so you always run into that.

If they're chipping up, bamboo is a big one. A lot of recycling centers will not accept bamboo waste wood chips because that will re-sprout from wood chips. If you get a load of bamboo wood chips dropped at your house, you're going to have a bamboo forest shortly. You look out for that.

Doug: What if an ash tree went through a shredder, would it have emerald ash bores still in it, or would the shredder destroy the beetle?

Lou: That's a great question. I know for the Asian longhorn beetle, which is a different pest but somewhat similar, it's also a beetle that bores, those quarantine areas require that the chips be run through a machine twice, so through your chipper once and then through a tub grinder once. At that point, they say that the pest has been destroyed.

Now, with emerald ash bore, if you live in an area with EAB, if you get a delivery of chips, it's probably going to be from somewhere local. No one's going to be driving from Pittsburgh, for instance, out to California to drop off a load of wood chips. I wouldn't be terribly concerned about that. It's a great concern, but I wouldn't really be concerned about that. I'd mean more concerned of the bamboo, poison ivy, that could be in there. That'd be minimal as well. Thorns, again, if you're walking around barefoot, if they're chipping up a locust tree, it has some wicked thorns in it. You really don't want that on your garden path.

Doug: What about all the big giant pieces of wood that get dumped into the back of the truck?

Lou: Yes. We go to that next. Generally, that doesn't get dumped into the back of the truck. That's a separate truck. We have loaders that'll come pick that up. That gets pretty interesting. Those can also go to recycling centers because those tub grinders that we're talking about, they can accept large pieces of wood. As long as it's not longer than 4 or 5 feet long, you can just drop those into a tub grinder. You feed a tub grinder with a gigantic caterpillar loader. You're not loading it with a wheelbarrow. They can pick up large pieces of wood.

Doug: You mean even a stump that I couldn't even fit my arms around, that big, could go into a tub grinder? Oh, wow.

Lou: Yes. Got a 5-foot by 5-foot piece if you think about that. You could take those to recycling centers. Milling operations also look for them. Now, we don't deal with that at Davey. We don't have any milling operations, but I know there are milling operations that will take wood if you have it. A lot of those, we will actually dump that. They don't buy from us but we can dump there. There's a lumber yard actually 20 minutes north of me here, and our local operations will dump wood there because they'll take it and they'll turn it into lumber if it's a good enough cut. They also have a tub grinder, so a lot of times it gets turned into mulch, but that's one place.

There's an urban wood marketplace that Davey has kind of organized that helps woodworkers to connect with unique logs that are being produced. If you're cutting a unique tree of sorts and a woodworker is in your area, you can use this app to connect so that they could find that. Back in Cincinnati, I had a guy in Madisonville, Don the woodworker, who anytime we would cut down a unique tree, I would always drop pieces off down there. He was a wood-turner, and he would turn it into bowls and spoons. If I brought a nice piece, he'd turn a bowl for me. My mom's Christmas present for years were these natural bowls that they were being made.

Doug: Well you went all out, Lou. You went all out for mom with a free bowl.

Lou: It took a lot of effort to lug these logs from a site into the back of my Subaru, down to this place. That's one way to do it. Firewood is another. Now, we don't create firewood at Davey, but I have lots of landscapers that we have relationships with around the area and around the country that we can drop logs off and they turn them into firewood for winter revenue. Something to do when landscapers are slow in the winter, if you're not in the snow market you can put your folks to work splitting wood and then selling that it as firewood in bundles.

Doug: Let me go back to the unique woods. What would be some unique wood that you'd be cutting down that somebody would want for woodworking? Cherry?

Lou: Cherry. Yes, absolutely. Cherry. Walnut is messy but it's really pretty. Redbud actually has a very, very pretty grain to it if you could find one large enough. If you turn a ball out of a redbud, it's pretty spectacular. Anytime you find a burl, obviously, woodworkers go nuts over burls. Then the larger oaks and tulip poplars aren't as interesting of wood, but those frequently get turned into firewood.

The problem with milling wood with woodworkers is if you say, all right, we need a 10-foot section of wood to turn into lumber. Well, if you're cutting down a 30-inch oak, a 10-foot section weighs a ton. That's a lot of weight. Your average operation can't really work with that.

That's the other thing, too, is that we have to balance the efficiency of creating the mess, finding a depot for the mess, the logistics of moving that debris to a woodworker or what else, a lot of times it's so much easier just to take it to a recycling center and turn it into mulch. That's unfortunate, but it just is the way of the world, right? There's a business decision of how much time and energy are we going to spend finding a unique use for this wood versus doing what we've always done that makes sense and that gets used. We're not taking it to a dump, we're reusing this in mulch.

Doug: I had another question, too, like when Davey is on the property and they're cutting trees up, in general, from your experience, and I know it's going to be case by case, but would you rather take the wood or do I save money by leaving the wood here?

Lou: Yes, you save money by leaving it.

Doug: Okay.

Lou: Now, this is where it gets tricky. If the homeowner says, hey, I've got a chainsaw, I'll cut this into firewood lengths, or whatever length they want, just leave the logs here, you're going to save a lot of money. If you say, hey, I don't have a chainsaw, but I have a wood splitter, so I need you to cut this into firewood lengths and then you can leave it here, that sometimes saves money and actually sometimes doesn't.

If it's big enough wood, it's easier for us just to use our large machines, pick it up, throw it on the back of a truck, and take it to a dump instead of having two folks on your property for six hours cutting up wood because you're paying for an hourly rate. You're paying for labor and that could get very messy spending hours cutting up firewood for a homeowner. It is case by case. It can work out to the homeowner's favor sometimes.

Then other times, too, one thing we didn't talk about with wood chips is if we're working in a forested area, just blasting those chips into a forest saves customers money also. You say, hey, if we leave these chips here, because again, we pay the labor to drive from the work site to a dump. We pay a dump to, or a recycling center, we call them a dump, but, to drive to a recycling center. Then we pay the recycling center to dump a load of chips there and then for the crew to drive from there to the shop. If we can leave the chips on site, and even better, if we can fan them out into a forest to return organic material to the forest floor, that's great.

Doug: Before I let you go, is there anything else wood waste-wise that you wanted to cover?

Lou: One last thing that I love, and we try and practice this as much as possible, is to leave snags, wildlife snags. We don't do this in front yards very often. It's usually in the back 40, but if there's a way to leave a 10 to 15-foot section of a trunk standing, so not cut it at all, that becomes a really important part of the ecological environment. A standing snag over time decays and allows, at first, you'll have insects that will populate it, then you'll have reptiles that populate it, and then woodpeckers will come in and they'll create holes in the decay pockets, and then you get screech owls that come in, and it becomes a hotel for wildlife basically, all while retaining the carbon that it has sequestered for however many years this tree has been alive.

Again, you don't leave it where it could fall onto a house or a fence or anything else, but if you have a forested property and you're removing a tree that is not anywhere near anything else, leaving that snag could be a really good thing for the environment and could end up saving you some money. I love doing that whenever possible.

Doug: I was just going to tell you, Lou, that's what they're doing on my property. I got three trees out there, they're in the middle of the woods, and the arborist I've worked with for years, he's like, hey, I want to just leave these standing, they won't hurt anything, and they'll be a positive for the environment. I'm glad you brought that up. Great stuff, Lou, I appreciate it. When we see each other in January though, and you want to get me something, forget about the turned bowl, maybe something a little different, but that's up to you.

Lou: Maybe a dinner of steamed Baltimore crabs, though.

Doug: Come on, now we're talking.

Lou: You betcha.

Doug: All right, Lou, as always, great to talk to you, and I'm sure we'll talk soon again.

Lou: Thanks so much, Doug. Pleasure to be here.

Doug: Lou and I have a chance to meet in person annually every January in Baltimore during a trade show, and last year we actually did the podcast from the event. He's just a great guy, and just filled with so much great information. Now, tune in every Thursday to the Talking Trees podcast from the Davey Tree Expert Company. I'm your host, Doug Oster. Do me a favor, subscribe to the podcast so you'll never miss one of these fun shows. Have an idea for an episode, or maybe a comment, send me an email to podcasts@davey.com. That's P-O-D-C-A-S-T-S@D-A-V-E-Y.com. As always, we like to remind you on the Talking Trees podcast, trees are the answer.

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