What to do with wood-chips?

[wookiewayne]

Hello everyone!

I'm Wayne, new to website, the industry and to Canada (originally from England). Came to Toronto for a new life, a new career and I'm living it!

Need some advice :-

I want to find a way to pass on wood-chip to those who can reprocess it and take it off our hands without paying through the nose. The city charge a small fortune and we have no facility to process it ourselves.

Can anyone help? Our business is located off Younge Street south of the 401 in Toronto.

Many thanks

Wayne

 

[BostonBull]

Hello everyone!

I'm Wayne, new to website, the industry and to Canada (originally from England). Came to Toronto for a new life, a new career and I'm living it!

Need some advice :-

I want to find a way to pass on wood-chip to those who can reprocess it and take it off our hands without paying through the nose. The city charge a small fortune and we have no facility to process it ourselves.

Can anyone help? Our business is located off Younge Street south of the 401 in Toronto.

Many thanks

Wayne

Find a powerplant who burns them for hog fuel and PAYS you for the chips!

Or find a co. who grinds them, dies them and calls it bark mulch. They may not pay you but will most likely take them for free.

 

[Stachura01]

advertise them for free delivery in some cheap outlet like a pennysaver. you'd be amazed how many people think it's good mulch. suckers.

 

[Beast12]

We sell all of our woodchips to homeowners. We get $115 per load delivered for about 10-12 yards. If the chips aren't that good (stringy or full of needles, pine or spruce) they get dumped at a local nursery nearby. They take them for free.

-Matt

 

[Jumper]

Find a powerplant who burns them for hog fuel and PAYS you for the chips!

In Toronto OMG you must be kidding!

A farmer who uses them as bedding for animals. I used to drop chips off at a number of poultry farms in the Ottawa area. Our city also took clean chips for mulch as it does seem as shame, in your case, to ship them to Michigan to a landfill. I also dumped chips at homes wanting fill, and at nursuries.

I would seriously consider billing the customer a surcharge, explaining that you are disposing of their tree in chip form in an environmentally responsible manner. This would fly in a lot of TO neighbourhoods IMHO given the Fiberal bent of most people there. Or offer to leave it in their drive to distribute on their own property, though you might have to arrange the labour. I would play up the green card here especially in richer neighbourhoods. Obviously not applicable to chips contaminated in any way.

There is a reason tree services cost what they do in TO , 90 miles east of there you would be getting half the gross revenue for a given job, but you would have places to dump your chips and firewood for free. I worked in such a place prior to coming here.

 

[alloutdoorsboy]

hey wookiewayne

hey there fellow Brit, Ive been over here for quite some time now but it still amazes me of the amount of waste over here. Now dont get me wrong I love living in the US and would never think of going back. I remember one of my first days of work over here (1991) I was taking down a big red oak, I asked the boss if I should cut a 6 foot or an 8foot section, thinking it would be used as a fence post or SOMETHING. He explained to cut it anywhere as the whole tree was going to the landfill!
16 years later and I now have an 18" chipper (to get rid of as much wood as possible) but have now bought land and am finally trying to utilieze some of the byproducts, I have built a 30x48 shop with a 14x48 appartment above it all post and beam with board and batten siding and am about to start on the house (now I have learnt from the shop). I am building a biomass incinerator that will provide heat and hopefully electricity. I feel like its everyones responsibilty to try not to waste but funilly enough the local government dont seem to agree! They are having fits about me using UNGRADED lumber in my building, even though Im using 8x12 oak beams to hold up 12' roof sections they would rather have me go to lowes and buy crooked 2x4s which are STAMPED. Dont even mention the incinerater, here its legal to have a contained burn of wood but you are not allowed to heat a structure with it????????

gotta go Paul

ps I was going to post a picture but how do I do that??

 

[Spockbob]

We just dumped our chips on our property for about 20 years. We ended up with about an acre 10-15 ft deep. Then we called in a backhoe to pile it (Now we have a big skid steer). We sell it as single ground mulch. $12 a yard plus delivery. Just make sure the ground crew doesn't throw garbage or wood in the chipper box. Chips age to a nice brown color in just a couple years.

 

[John Paul Sanborn]

advertise them for free delivery in some cheap outlet like a pennysaver. you'd be amazed how many people think it's good mulch. suckers.

Such a cynic! Why are they not good, compared to the storebought dyed stuff? Compost is better, but if all you are doing is a topdress to existing mulch, then it is good.

I would advertise it as free chip, not mulch, just to be technically correct.

Do the math on the cost so you can price in the tripcharge correctly. I used to keep a "little black book" of clients who wanted chip regularly, then I found out that I could make more on my commissions for sales and production then the cash I made calling around and driving out to tip a load. I could dump on the backlot and push it into the vacant land behind every quarter with a rented skidder and save money.

Other free sites are new development, parks, farmfields vs barnyards. I know of several people who have secret farmland locations where they dump in low spots the farmer wants to fill in.