Where Your Tree Actually Goes After We Take It Away

Ask a tree contractor what happens to the material after they leave. It is a more revealing question than it sounds, and the answer separates the industry into two halves.

A mature backyard eucalypt is ten to twenty tonnes of biomass. It represents sixty or eighty years of a tree pulling carbon out of the air and locking it into timber. The default industry answer is to chip the lot, truck it to a green waste facility, pay a tipping fee, and let it break down. That is not the worst outcome available, but it is a long way from the best one.

Four places it can go

Landfill

The worst option and, disappointingly, still common for mixed loads. Organic material buried in landfill breaks down anaerobically and produces methane, which is a far more potent greenhouse gas than the carbon dioxide the tree originally absorbed. You are paying someone to convert a carbon sink into a carbon source.

Green waste and commercial composting

Better. The material is chipped and composted at scale, and usually comes back as a commercial soil product. It works, but it is trucked twice, processed industrially, and the value lands with the processor rather than the person who paid for the tree work.

Mulch

Chipped, stockpiled and aged, then used on garden beds. This is the highest-volume good outcome, because most of a tree by volume is limbs and foliage rather than trunk. Aged properly, it holds water through an Illawarra February, suppresses weeds and builds soil as it breaks down.

The word "aged" is doing real work in that sentence. Fresh chip is high in carbon and pulls nitrogen out of the soil as it decomposes, which is why plants sulk when green chip goes straight onto a bed. Stockpiling it for a few months fixes that. Anyone handing you chip straight off the truck and calling it mulch is handing you a problem.

Firewood

Hardwood rounds split and seasoned. This is the highest-value outcome for the trunk and major limbs of most eucalypts, and it displaces something else being burnt. The catch is time: properly seasoned firewood needs eight to twelve months split and stacked with air moving through it. Anyone selling you firewood cut last month is selling you water.

Milled timber

The best outcome and the rarest, because it needs the right trunk and a lot of patience. A straight, clear section over about 500mm diameter with no embedded metal can be slabbed into furniture timber. That locks the carbon up for decades instead of months, and it turns a removal into something that stays in the house.

Air drying runs at roughly a year per 25mm of thickness, so a 50mm slab is a two year wait. There is no way to rush it without a kiln and no point pretending otherwise. It is the part of our own loop we are still building out.

The decision gets made before we arrive

Here is the practical thing. Once a trunk is cut into rounds for a firewood truck, the milling option is gone. Once material is mixed with weed species and contaminated fill, the clean mulch option is gone.

So if you have a tree coming down with a good trunk in it, or one with some history to it, say so when you book the quote rather than after the job. We will cut it to length for slabbing instead of to length for a firewood load. It costs you nothing and it is the difference between a table and a pile of chip.

Why we bothered building the business this way

Honestly, because paying a tip fee to throw away good hardwood is a strange way to run a business. The timber is worth something. The firewood is worth something. Somebody is going to buy both. It made no sense that the material was going one way and the money another.

So the mulch goes back out to Illawarra gardens, the firewood goes back out to Illawarra houses, and the good trunks are starting to go to local makers. The tree that came out of a backyard in Figtree ends up on a garden bed in Corrimal and in a fireplace in Thirroul.

That is the whole idea, and it is why the business is called what it is. If you want the mulch from your own tree, just say so before we start and we will leave it in a pile wherever you like, free.