Uses for small wood/chips

[Treebeard]

The Forest Service, state, & other municipal landowners here in New Mexico and throughout the Southwest are about to engage in a longterm & pretty massive effort to thin overgrown forests in an effort to restore more natural conditions and reduce wildfire risks and damage. This work is mainly taking out large numbers of small trees, six inches & under. In many areas they plan to stack & burn the wood since they want it removed from the forest but have no market for such small materials. Even if chipped all the material would need to be removed from the forest. I'm wondering if anyone has heard of any way to use such materials in a profitable way. We're about to be up to our necks in firewood from these programs and I'm not sure what you can do with entirely chipped trees, needles & all in the mix. Any ideas?

 

[treeclimber165]

When I worked for a local municipality, we had a tub grinder come in 1x-2x per year to grind up our debris at our private dump. They loaded the chips into semi's and trucked it to Tampa for a power plant. You need to check in your area and see if something like this is feasable there.

 

[sonny]

Lots of electric plants burrning tree chips. we use to send tons & tons a day to them. Tub grinder to make compost, Im sure compost is in big demand, in the So. part of your state.

 

[Deere John]

There are a lot of very modern sawmills today that consider a 6" log to be average. Search out your area and you may be able to flog the 4"-7" portion to recover costs.

Hog fuel, as mentioned, is better than just burning them on site.

Fence posts?

Landscape timbers?

Pulp with a better market than we have now - delay the project abit?

Whole tree chippers with chain flail debarkers can get bark percents down to 1-2%, acceptable to most plup mills. Better if the work is done when the cambium is growing and the bark is lose.