The Industry of urban wood waste

Tom Dunlap said:
Does anyone know of a prune/remove tree care company who has made wood waste utilization a real money-making part of their company?

giving away free loads of logs or chips straight from the chipper isn't what I mean. Chipping and screening to make a uniform clean product does. firewood processing that actually makes money not just used to get rid of dump fees.
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I don't know if they make money at it or not but Atlas Tree near me in Sebastopol CA has huge piles of ground up waste. They seem to process all their own material. I haven't ever seen indication of a sales process but I suspect they ship it all out in 40' plus trailers. Co generation fuel for electricity plants?
 
Brando CalPankian said:
Is anyone using wood waste for food production? Mushrooms, compost for food plots, insect feed, etc?
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whenever I can convince someone to come dump chips at my place, I have been mostly using it for my compost pile. I also get lots of perishable leftovers from the food bank when they don't get as many people coming to pickup. I will expand my composting situation further when I can, but with my neighbors all contributing bedding and manure fron their sheep and horses, I have a 20 yard pile, that grows faster than I can use it right now. Once the house is built and I can focus once again on farming endeavours, it will be nice to have such a stockpile. I wanna make a situation to compete with the wood guy by the dump. If anyone in my region sees this: I TAKE UGLY CHIPS!
 
Matias said:
whenever I can convince someone to come dump chips at my place, I have been mostly using it for my compost pile. I also get lots of perishable leftovers from the food bank when they don't get as many people coming to pickup. I will expand my composting situation further when I can, but with my neighbors all contributing bedding and manure fron their sheep and horses, I have a 20 yard pile, that grows faster than I can use it right now. Once the house is built and I can focus once again on farming endeavours, it will be nice to have such a stockpile. I wanna make a situation to compete with the wood guy by the dump. If anyone in my region sees this: I TAKE UGLY CHIPS!
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have you looked into compost hot water heaters? I once saw a vid of a guy who claimed to heat water for his shower using radiant heat from a mulch pile.
 
Matias said:
whenever I can convince someone to come dump chips at my place, I have been mostly using it for my compost pile. I also get lots of perishable leftovers from the food bank when they don't get as many people coming to pickup. I will expand my composting situation further when I can, but with my neighbors all contributing bedding and manure fron their sheep and horses, I have a 20 yard pile, that grows faster than I can use it right now. Once the house is built and I can focus once again on farming endeavours, it will be nice to have such a stockpile. I wanna make a situation to compete with the wood guy by the dump. If anyone in my region sees this: I TAKE UGLY CHIPS!
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Our old landlords had a deal worked out with the local grocery stores. They would rotate garbage cans of produce unfit for sale. All under the guise of feeding to live stock. Which they did but they cherry picked and ran a underground food bank.

I always thought it was funny as they were far right, all for NRA and Sara Paylin. Oddly we agreed on much.
 
A company I previously worked for tried to make use of what tree byproducts we could. Hardwood firewood was sold/delivered either log length or split. We would deliver chips for a fee, either directly from the jobsite if we had a close buyer, or from the shop/logyard. Locust was saved and sold for fence posts. Cedar was similarly saved and sold for it's rot resistance. Funky pieces, burls, etc were saved and sold to local woodworkers and artists. Subsidiary rough cut lumber business, Hardwood and softwood, with a per diem mill operator. Stocked popular common sizes and did custom orders and slabs. Maple logs would sometimes be aged to produce spalted lumber.

Chainsaw carver at the log yard with many carvings on display visible from the road. He would pick out wood from our piles. I believe the owner got a small kickback from his sales.

No profit but the boss would sometimes keep "bolts" of red oak for his shiitake cultivation.

The philosophy was something to the effect of "if we have to kill the tree, then we're going to utilize as much as we can." Profitability in doing so was the icing on the cake. Cool guy to work for. Some days (most) I miss working there.
 
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Serf Life said:
www.chelseagreen.com

The Woodchip Handbook by Ben Raskin

The Woodchip Handbook by Ben Raskin is the essential guide to the many uses of woodchip both in regenerative agriculture and horticulture.
www.chelseagreen.com www.chelseagreen.com
Took it out from the library. Worth borrowing for the references, book itself was written for all readers…
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I was gifted a copy last year. A great reference worth adding to any arb's library.
 
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