Chainsaw Sawdust with Bar Oil - disposal ?

G

GregManning

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Location
Chardon, OH
I recently bucked about 5 cords worth of hardwood firewood in a relatively small area of my lawn.
As I cleaned up the sawdust to get back to grass, I put it into a 5 cu. ft. Jet Sled and dumped it into ground divots in the woods. The total unpacked sawdust was ~ 25+ cu. ft. (Much more than I expected.)

BTW .............. Who else has EVER measured sawdust ! ! ? ?

This sawdust probably has ~ 2 quarts of bar oil mixed in !

I am not an environmental wacko, but what can be done with this stuff ?

This would not make good compost.
If I could properly dry it, I'd burn it in the wood stove. (No good procedure.)

I know some folks (Limbwalker's ?) use bio-oil.
I don't know how extensively they use bio-oil, and what the equipment results are.
(Maybe next time ?)
 
I do things a bit different. Buck onto vinyl tarp roll log repeat. Hate raking!
So most oil blows away onto landscape. Saw chips rooster. Tail onto tarp. Big bucking I tarp both sides of log.
Stihl biooil for a few yrs now.
When aerial cutting I worry less about breathing or. Ingesting with biooil. Or spraying down on workers etc. Daily handling an all that biooil for the win
 
I was in your place a number of years ago. After two of us spent about two hours bucking up logs into firewood length we realized that we'd used about a gallon of oil for the two saws. Just downhill from us was a small pond. That got me thinking about using veggie oil. This was many years before any sort of bio-oil was available.

i'm with you on this concern. The incidental bit of oil during a typical prune or small removal.,.hard to be too concerned. My hope is that what soil scientists have said...the microbes in most soils neutralize the bad effects.

But in this case I've wondered too. Burning seems like a good way...but has limits. When i had this happen I would rake it up and toss it into the chip truck. Not in piles, the sawdust would be dusted all over the chips to reduce concentration. I was hopeful that the composting action going on would do whatever I could hope for.
 
Rake up all the saw dust, and inoculate it with oyster mushrooms. They will breakdown the hydrocarbons... Lots on the web about it too..
Ive has similar thought too. Would you take a gallon of oil and just pour it on the ground? Would you take a gallon of oil and spray it all over a 1/2 acre with a spray bottle, a little here and a little there? So I made the switch to bio oil, and I'm lazy so I use the stihl brand which is a little spendy. No issues what so ever.
 
evo said:
Rake up all the saw dust, and inoculate it with oyster mushrooms. They will breakdown the hydrocarbons... Lots on the web about it too..
Ive has similar thought too. Would you take a gallon of oil and just pour it on the ground? Would you take a gallon of oil and spray it all over a 1/2 acre with a spray bottle, a little here and a little there? So I made the switch to bio oil, and I'm lazy so I use the stihl brand which is a little spendy. No issues what so ever.
Click to expand...
Actually, about 30+ years ago I grew some oyster mushroom on a compressed sawdust log. (part of a commercial "kit")
They did not taste very good. My guess is that the sawdust contained lots of resin, e.g. pine, etc.

I was a little skeptical about the oyster mushrooms breaking down the oil, so I went on the web as you suggested.

Your obviously correct; it is possible.
However, the very large article that I scanned did indicate:

"different strains of a single mushroom species can have wildly varying levels of chemical activity. So the team grew a few dozen strains of oyster mushroom, testing each for oil-digesting ability in petri dishes in the lab. "

Link: http://discovermagazine.com/2013/ju...oil-spills-nuclear-meltdowns-and-human-health

Next time I do some bucking, I'll use Stihl's BioPlus-bar-oil. Stihl's web site states: "degrading by 93.8% in only 21 days". That's fast !

I wonder what the "shelf life" of BioPlus is ? ? ?

Thanks for the feed back.
 
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evo said:
Would you take a gallon of oil and just pour it on the ground? Would you take a gallon of oil and spray it all over a 1/2 acre with a spray bottle, a little here and a little there?
Click to expand...

Not only would I but, I have. As farm kids we were tasked with spreading the used motor oil down our dirt/graveled road to keep the dust down.

Keep up the upwardly educating threads it will inoculate people like me as an 8 year old and the guys I saw pictured in National Geographic who poured a 55 gallon drum of used oil over a bridge somewhere in India to get rid of it. At a quickening pace because of social media/ the web, we will all be making better choices.
 
I'm sure we all have done things like this... I've burned bags of foam packing peanuts, old carpet ect... All as a kid on acreage not knowing better... But know we know better...
 
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