Where do tree surgeons take waste?
Planning on hiring a tree surgeon to prune your trees or trim your hedges, or are you doing these things yourself? Then you will make a lot of green waste in a short amount of time. So if you are trying to save a bit of money and do it yourself, you might be wondering where do tree surgeons take waste. Well, The King’s Lynn Tree Surgeon makes a lot of green waste every year. Most of which we have to remove from the site and recycle. So if we recycle everything we take away from a site, we don’t have to put it in a landfill.
What type of waste do tree surgeons have to deal with?
The three main types of waste that come from trees are:
- Woodchips
- Timber
- Materials that can’t be broken (hedge trimmings, minor pruning, and contaminated sweeping from the floor)
Machinery to deal with waste
After we have cut down a tree, chippers (also called “wood chippers”) are used to turn most of our waste into wood chips. We don’t use any other kind of chipper. This is because we haul equipment on trailers behind our vehicles. So we can dump the wood chips right into the back of our trucks after they’ve gone through the chipper. Most of the debris that can’t be chipped is put into vans by hand.
Some of our customers keep all the waste they or we make. Most people ask to keep the timber for making firewood, turning wood, or carving. On rare occasions, planking is done with wood. Wood chips are often used by our customers as a barrier against weeds and to keep walkways and borders moist.
What do we do with the waste we take away from the site?
First, at our facility, we store hundreds of tonnes of wood chips every year. Most of this wood chip is sold as mulch for gardens and walkways. But before it can be used as mulch, it needs to be stored for a while so that it can break down. When new mulch is put down in a garden, the nitrogen that the bacteria that break down wood need is taken out of the soil. So this could be bad for the plants which is why our Kings Lynn tree surgeons leave it for a while.
People often ask how much wood chips they need for a certain size garden. As a general rule, you shouldn’t use less than 5 cm of wood-chip mulch. We sell wood chips by cubic metres, and a 5cm layer of wood chips can cover an area of 20 square metres. So, it’s easy to figure out how much wood chips you’ll need to mulch your garden. You can do this by taking a rough measurement of the area. Furthermore, we use a tipper truck instead of bags from a garden centre to move the wood chips so we can save money.
What we can't sell as mulch gets used as Biomass fuel in power plants
We don’t take away as much good-quality wood as we used to. This is because lots of our clients burn it themselves or give it to a family member or friend who does. Our workers log the small amount of valuable wood we cut down for their fireplaces at home (a small perk of the job). But many nearby businesses that need logs use lower-quality wood like fir, willow, chestnut, and other similar species.
Waste that can't be broken down
When we trim our hedges, we make a lot of waste that our chippers can’t handle. We also have a lot of soil and grit-contaminated material that is scraped or swept up (which can damage chipper blades). The trash is then taken away and used as Biomass fuel at different power plants, sometimes with wood chips.
Conclusion
No matter what we do with the waste from cutting down trees in Kings Lynn, we’ll have to use some energy to clean it up and move it. But we try to limit this as much as possible. This is by making sure our work and travel schedules are efficiently organised. So we don’t just ship any of our wood chips out of the area straight away. First, we try to sell as much of it as possible in the location where it was cut.