Strict landfill regulations and cleaner-air pollution standards have created the next wave in recycling with the potential to become the cash crop of the new millennium. Forward-thinking entrepreneurs and municipalities now know how to take advantage of the machinery that helps turn landfill-bound yardwaste and timber into year-round profits and greener communities.

By Mark Saunders

The Right Tool for the Right Job
Economies of Scale
From Raw Materials to Profits
Working Smarter Instead of Harder
Creatures of Habit
Expensive Equipment Requires Well-Trained Operators
Machinery That Opens Markets
Entrepreneurs Create Opportunities, Machines Fulfill That Vision

If you stopped people on the street and asked them to tell you the first word that popped into their minds when you said "recycling," they might mention aluminum, glass, newspapers, office paper, or maybe even cardboard. But just as all these materials were once considered garbage, yardwaste has emerged from its lowly status as worthless trash destined for the local landfill to become a profitable player in the world of recycling.

Regardless of whether the raw materials come from your backyard, a tree service, a lumber mill, old pallets stacked out behind a factory, or animal bedding from a zoo or a racetrack, the business of turning yardwaste into such marketable products as mulch, compost, and cogeneration fuel is recognized as a money-making enterprise.

Every day, hundreds of tons of yardwaste are diverted from wastestreams all across the country, reduced in volume by either a chipper or a grinder, and recycled into superior-quality soil amendments and ground cover. Although yardwaste naturally decomposes in or out of a landfill, without the machinery to slice and dice an entire tree into a pile of toothpick-size shavings in less than a minute, the entire process of turning greenwaste into other products would be far too time-intensive to be profitable.

In the lexicon of backyard composters, there’s an expression, "Compost happens." Mother Nature, left to her own devices, harnesses moisture, bacteria, fungi, yeast, insects, and an army of worms into a powerful force that gradually degrades even the mightiest sequoia into rich, fertile soil. Virtually any organic material will decompose and enrich the soil. If you doubt that statement, just go for a walk under the trees in the nearest open-space area. Once under the canopy of interlocking branches, take a look under your feet. You are bound to find stratified layers of leaves in various stages of decomposition.

In the drier top layer, the leaves are well defined. As you dig a little deeper, the leaves start to break down and the microbes and bugs go to work. Within a few inches, the leaves are intermingled and mixed in with the soil in a moist, dark layer. It’s a perfect recycling system where the fallen leaves enrich the soil, and trees basically fertilize themselves. But the process takes years.

Converting a flatbed full of branches and brush into chipped wood for mulch, reducing an entire tree into 0.5-in. chips ready to be mixed with other materials to create compost, or shredding old stumps and pallets is the critical step for the business end of making mulch, compost, or cogeneration fuel. Today savvy entrepreneurs and forward-thinking communities use cutting-edge machinery to turn landfill restrictions and stricter air-pollution standards into profitable raw materials for a booming market in natural soil amendments and ground cover or, at the very least, a great public relations campaign.

"It’s cheaper to bury this stuff or just throw it in a big pile and torch it, but clearly that has some environmental problems associated with it in terms of air quality, water, ground pollution, and so on," states Dan Brandon, Morbark marketing manager. "So about a decade ago, we saw the first laws being passed that said we had to divert percentages of our wastestream. And one of the easiest parts of the wastestream to recycle is this greenwaste/woodwaste material."

The Right Tool for the Right Job

The kinds of machinery required to convert greenwaste into the appropriate size of wood chips depend on the size of the job, the size of the operation, and the desired result. For example, a chipper designed to handle 12-in.-diameter logs would not be very effective on large stumps, just as using a large-capacity tub grinder to shred brush and tree limbs alone would be overkill. While both chippers and grinders are designed to reduce volume, the markets for desired end product determines the size and type of machinery needed to do the job right.

The variety of equipment choices, lease-versus-buy options, and operational issues can be seen in the different decisions made by two small tree services in the Front Range area of Colorado. Will Pittenger, the sole proprietor of Colorado Tree Care, leases his main chipper (a Vermeer 925) because the capital expense of the machines would put too great a strain on his cash flow.

"I lease it with a $1 buyout," relates Pittenger. "I don’t know of a tree company who doesn’t lease [machines]. I don’t know anybody that has that kind of cash around. I’ve had a couple of leases, and they’ve all worked out really well."

Pittenger picked Vermeer over other brands because it has a dealer close by in Denver. "If I had problems, I didn’t want to be dealing with somebody in Florida or Pennsylvania," he explains. "I’ve really had good luck with Vermeer. I bought a stump grinder from them and had some problems with it, and they really stood by it. Also, with my chipper, the warranty expired, but I had a big problem with the engine. They got on the phone to Wisconsin Engines and it took awhile, but I never got charged for a rebuilt engine. They didn’t feel that the problem was lack of maintenance or anything on my part. They just felt that I should have gotten a little longer life out of that engine. They even gave me a loaner."

Instead of leasing equipment as Pittenger does, Rich Nelson of Nelson Tree Service opted to buy two used chippers from another tree company to help keep his initial startup costs down.

"You will talk to a lot of guys with chippers who lease them or buy new ones," notes Nelson. "But we’re a fairly new business; we opened up about five years ago. So just to avoid going into debt, I opted to run with older equipment for a few years until we get better established. That’s why we have the older-style drum-model chippers. They’ll chip stuff from debris–small branches and viney stuff–on up to 4- or 6-inch trees depending on what kind of wood it is."

Both of these small tree services do the work on their own machines and use outside mechanics to do the more extensive work.

"We do work on our own equipment, but if we have a major project, I have two guys: one is a mobile mechanic and the other is a friend who does private work in his garage," explains Nelson. "It depends on what the project is. When we had a new engine put in one chipper, I let a mechanic do it. On stuff like replacing blades or sharpening them, we’ll be the ones to pull the parts and send out the blades to be sharpened. We’ll cycle out two or three sets of blades per chipper: one’s in the shop, one’s in the machine, and one’s on standby ready to be put in the machine. We do the same with our stump grinders."

Because of the demand for wood chips by residential customers and local nurseries, both tree services easily unload their byproducts.

"Sometimes customers want it for gardens, yards, landscaping, and it looks pretty nice, depending on how you do your landscaping," observes Nelson. "It’s good for the trees and plants. We also give it to a landscaping company and a nursery, and they do two things: They’re actually saving a huge pile for compost, and they use it in replanting smaller trees that are maybe 5 or 6 feet tall. They use the mulch to set those trees in the soil so it’s easier to dig up the trees when it comes time to sell them."

"I never have any trouble getting rid of wood chips," says Pittenger. "Some people want to keep the chips as a mulch around trees. If I get a special request, like someone who just wants wood from a dead tree with no pine needles or juniper or something like that, we have to be very careful about what we feed in the chipper. I’ll charge $10 to $25 for 5 to 7 cubic yards. But I’ve never had to pay anyone to take my wood chips. Worst comes to worst, I’ll start calling nurseries. I’ve got a couple that I deliver to now, but that’s few and far between because there are so many people out there who want chips."

Economies of Scale

On the other end of the tree service spectrum from Pittenger and Nelson is West Tree Service of Little Rock, AR. West Tree Service does line clearing for electric utility companies and employs approximately 300 workers divided into between 100 and 110 work crews. According to Co-owner and Vice President Bill Jackson, about 10 of those crews are running special equipment, such as tractors, loaders, or brush hogs, and the rest are chainsaw and chipper crews. It’s no stretch of the imagination to say that West Tree Service runs a fleet of chippers.

"We’re large enough and buy enough chippers every year that we buy straight from the manufacturer," states Jackson. "We don’t go through a dealer. I guess you could say we are a dealer."

And although West Tree Service is a de facto chipper dealer, Jackson, who has been in the line-clearing business for 30 years, does not order all of his replacements direct from the manufacturer because they cost more.

"If it’s engine parts, we can normally get them from aftermarket suppliers. If it’s a part manufactured by a particular manufacturer, we go back and order it straight from the manufacturer."

Jackson also believes it is better for his company to buy its equipment from several manufacturers because the diversification helps give the business a greater sense of autonomy and frees it from periodic slowdowns caused by parts or labor shortages on the manufacturing end.

"We found in the past that if we try to buy from more than one vendor, we’re better off. If we get locked into one, and something happens or somebody goes on strike, then we have a problem. We buy most of our chippers from three vendors."

Jackson says most of the chipped wood generated by his line-clearing crews is either given away to people in the community or landfilled at a site provided by the utility company his company works for.

"You can’t just take it to any city or county dump," points out Jackson. "EPA has certain restrictions about where you can and can’t put it. We give away a lot of it. Our guys will be working in a neighborhood, and a fellow comes along and says, ‘What are you going to do with those chips?’ We tell him that we’re just going to dump them. And then he asks, ‘Would you like to come dump them in my yard?’ And that usually takes care of it."

From Raw Materials to Profits

Tree services, line-clearing companies, lumber mills, and even pulp mills all face the same question about what to do with the byproducts. Few states still offer the luxury of Jackson’s situation in Arkansas, allowing a contractor to landfill material, even if the dump site is on private property.

"In your more progressive states they have environmental regulations or have completely banned this type of material from their landfills," notes Brandon. "So it forces somebody’s hand to develop a recycling situation, whereas there are still states scattered around here and there that haven’t regulated this much at all, where you can still do things like burning.

"Over the last decade or so, our company has seen phenomenal growth in this type of equipment because of the environmental laws and regulations. Now you’re seeing a lot of people who have gone beyond disposal reduction and actually profitable businesses because they’ve learned how to market the end material. If you don’t have markets for what you’re producing, then you’re buying very expensive equipment and tying up a lot of money and grinding and screening and so on. And if you don’t have a place to sell that stuff at the end, in most cases you’re not going to be successful.

"As this whole industry has matured over the last 10 years or so, we’ve seen that the successful operations are the ones that focused on the marketing side. And they are developing decorative landscape mulch, compost, and even fuel in some parts of the country. They charge tipping fees upfront to process the material, and then they charge again on the other end after they process the material. Those are the guys who are making money. The smart operators have figured out how to make money every time they turn around. And they are solving a huge waste issue. I don’t have the numbers in front of me [regarding] how many millions of tons of this stuff gets recycled every year, but that number gets larger every year.

"The successful greenwaste recyclers are not only eliminating a problem, they are adding value to a product. And that’s where the niche is. It’s kind of a cool thing. It’s good for us in manufacturing, but it’s also good for the taxpayers and everyone else. And it makes so much sense. Why bury this stuff? Why take up valuable landfill space with brush, trees stumps, and so on when there’s is technology available now to process it. You can’t come up with a stump too big or a log too long for this equipment to handle."

Working Smarter Instead of Harder

One of the entrepreneurs Brandon refers to is Judd Hart, president and CEO of J.H. Hart Urban Forestry in Sterling Heights, MI, a Detroit suburb. Hart has seven divisions (mulching, line clearing, recycling, residential contracts, city contracts, total plant care, and golf course maintenance) working together to create raw materials, process those materials into marketable products, and serve the customer with a variety of value-added benefits at the same time.

Hart’s mulch division turns the chipped wood created by the line-clearing, residential, and city contracts division and combines it with bark that a local sawmill pays his company to haul away. Then he sells back that landscape mulch for $15-20/yd.³ to some of the same customers who paid to have the raw materials removed from their property in the first place.

"We sell thousands and thousands of yards of it," reports Hart. "It was one of those things that we just stumbled into and realized, ‘Oh, this is cool.’"

The recycling division takes tipped yardwaste (from brush to whole trees and everything in between) and turns it into the mulch and the perfect carbon source for a small composting operation. The total plant care and golf course divisions help take care of the plants and trees for residential, municipal, and golf course customers.

"We used to have a snowplow division. But if you ever want a divorce, just buy a truck with a snowplow," Hart jokes.

"In the Detroit metropolitan area, solid woodwaste products are impossible to get rid of," he says. "The firewood business is almost nonexistent because we’re in a very wealthy, gas-log type of a county. Dumps won’t take it. So we’ve got a little niche here where we provide a custom grind service for the local tree companies and municipalities where we’ll come in and grind your wood and make your mulch for you."

When Hart receives wood unsuitable for turning into soil amendments, it becomes cogeneration fuel.

"Occasionally we get a situation when the product is just so bad, we can’t do anything with it," he relates. "For example, if you process a pine tree through the Beast [a Bandit 3680 horizontal grinder], it comes out just as green as when it went in. You can’t do much with that. So we have a bin in our yard that enables us to take the wood to a power plant in northern Michigan that uses it for boiler fuel.

"We learned a long time ago that diversification helps to stem the slower times in each respective division. Right now we’re just trying to keep up with going from job to job."

Creatures of Habit

Unlike Jackson at West Tree Service, Hart prefers to follow the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle when it comes to everything from large equipment to replacement parts. He likes the idea of purchasing machines that have interchangeable replacement parts.

"I can buy one case of oil filters, and they’ll fit every one of my engines. There’s just something to be said for uniformity. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If it works, we stick with it. I’ve tried all of the different manufacturers…. Bandit has done such a beautiful job servicing me and giving me a product that doesn’t need servicing."

Hart’s love of uniformity also includes Cummins diesel engines. All 38 of his trucks have Cummins power plants, as do his grinders. One of his Bandit 3680s has a Cummins N-14 475-hp Cummins engine, and the other has an N-11 350-hp Cummins engine. He also supports his grinders with Prentice 120 log loaders, and he has two others that work hand in hand with the tree-care crews.

Expensive Equipment Requires Well-Trained Operators

Although training new hires the safe and proper use of a chipper can be done with a 45-minute video followed by an in-service, operating a large grinder that requires a loader and has a throughput conveyor belt delivering up to 100 tph of material is a totally different animal.

Each one of Hart’s grinders has its own operator whose sole job is to run that machine. When that operator goes on vacation, the machine goes down for routine maintenance.

"Those guys can’t just call in and say, ‘Hey, I’m taking the day off.’ It just doesn’t work that way," states Hart. "One of the operators is a big deer hunter, so we know we’re going to do maintenance on that machine around November 15 because that’s when deer season starts in Michigan.

"There is absolutely, unequivocally no way that we could ever just throw someone in as a Beast operator. It takes months of experience to figure out the idiosyncrasies of how to use it and how to grind with it."

A-1 Organics in Loveland, CO, has a similar relationship between the company’s Morbark 1300 tub grinder and its operator.

"We have one operator who runs that particular piece of equipment," says A-1 Production Manager Tom Lincoln. "He’s also a mechanic, and he does all the basic maintenance, checks the fluid levels, and makes sure everything is properly greased, that there’s no loose hammers or bolts that are busted off, and that the grinder is clean of dirt and debris because those are a real enemy. He’s the one who’s responsible for that machine."

The combination of operator and mechanic helps A-1 reduce payroll costs and is an example of the kind of synergy necessary to turn yardwaste into profitable soil amendments. A-1 takes this same approach with its own woodwaste grinding operations.

"When we grind for someone else, we take their material most of the time," explains Lincoln. "We charge them to grind it, then we charge them a fee for hauling away the material. We use all the ground wood we can get our hands on as a carbon source for our compost."

A-1 uses the yardwaste/woodwaste in two ways: It’s mixed and composted with biosolids to create Biocomp (a compost made from yardwaste, animal manure, and animal bedding) or it goes directly into windrows to make the company’s 100% yardwaste compost.

Because composting creates a product with a finer particle size than a mostly mulch operation such as Hart’s, A-1 owns several PowerMotive Trommel screens. And as you would expect, it also owns a couple of windrow turners (Frontier) and several front-end loaders to support the grinding and screening operations.

Machinery That Opens Markets

Similar to A-1 Organics, Glenda Jefcoat’s NU-Earth Organics of New Orleans, LA, is in the business of converting yardwaste into compost. The yardwaste she works with includes trees, grass, yard clippings, racetrack bedding, police academy hay bedding, animal bedding from New Orleans’ Ottoman Zoo, cotton-gin waste, corn stalks, chicken manure, bagasse from sugar-cane mills, and coffee byproducts from a local Folgers’ plant. Jefcoat uses a Peterson Pacific 5400 horizontal grinder to chip the wood and blend everything together. (Jefcoat claims she could not have a tub grinder at her location because of the possible liability from thrown objects.)

She believes that a second horizontal grinder would allow her growing business to expand into new retail markets.

"What’s going on down here is what’s been going on in other areas of the country for a few years," observes Jefcoat. "People down here are just now starting to realize that everything is not going to be able to go to the landfill. And it’s been a battle. People are just now starting to recognize the importance and the value of the products we are producing.

"A new grinder will allow me to reach more markets. In my business, the grinding end is my slower end…. If I had another machine, I’d put in a bagging machine, which would enable me to take the product to more market sources. We would be able to reach a larger market area through bagging…. There are areas that we have just not approached yet. And a second grinder would definitely help me reach out for another retail market. It will happen; it’s just a matter of time."

Despite the lack of a second grinder and a bagging machine, Jefcoat’s business blossomed–in part because of the positive relationships she developed with local tree companies.

"I would say that 95% of tree companies in the area bring me their trees. I give them a break if they bring in chips as opposed to a whole tree…. The tree people and the landscape people who bring stuff in all the time need me because they don’t have anywhere else to go. If they bring stuff in plastic bags, they empty them because they know that if I ever catch them [bringing in garbage], they don’t come back again.

"One of the things that’s pretty good for us is that I have enough trucks to deliver in large quantities. So we’ve been working on getting the right contractors who are going into the big jobs like office buildings, hospitals, and places where we’re talking about a larger volume being delivered. Our goal is to let more of those kinds of contractors know that we are a small, minority-owned company and we want their business."

Entrepreneurs Create Opportunities, Machines Fulfill That Vision

Tub grinders were originally designed to break up hay and other agricultural products. The first chippers were built to solve the problem of how to transport large, cumbersome branches and brush from a landscape customer’s yard to the landfill. Both have been redesigned to convert debris once considered waste into the raw materials for soil amendments. These amendments are superior to petrochemical-based fertilizers and create a soil environment requiring less water and reducing the need for pesticides and herbicides.

As equipment manufacturers continue to work with managers and business owners to create innovative solutions for turning existing waste into new revenue streams, they will also create new industries and new jobs as they redefine our awareness of what is and isn’t trash.

"Bottom line, I think that we’re just scratching the surface with this kind of organic recycling," says Brandon. "There are literally millions of tons of this stuff produced every year. You’ll see more and more people taking the opportunity to both solve an environmental challenge and profit from it. Our job is to help them with the right equipment to do that."

As with any tool, this equipment is only as useful as the imaginations of the entrepreneurs who envision new ways to exploit existing opportunities. But when the insight and equipment work in concert, expect to see interesting new applications of technology that will achieve what medieval alchemists set out to do centuries ago–turn straw into gold.

Guest author Mark Saunders is a newspaper and magazine journalist based in Denver, CO.