Storms left towns with mulch, firewood to spareLast updated: Monday November 28, 2011, 7:38 AM
BY STEPHANIE AKIN
STAFF WRITER
Several North Jersey towns desperate to get rid of wood debris from Hurricane Irene and the Halloween nor'easter are offering residents free mulch, wood chips and even firewood.
DON SMITH/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Mulch stored in the Maywood pool parking lot. Maywood is among many towns asking residents to help themselves. Municipal officials said their benevolence is inspired by a glut of downed trees that has made it difficult and expensive to dispose of the wood.
"The market for mulch is nonexistent right now. People are being paid money to take it away," Hackensack City Manager Stephen Lo Iacono said. "We thought, we're not being paid any money anyway, why not give the benefit to our residents?"
Teaneck has mounds of wood chips available at the township garden club and DPW buildings. Maywood has been piling wood chips and free firewood in its swimming pool parking lot since the Halloween storm. And Hackensack just hired a contractor with a heavy-duty machine to convert tree trunks into several grades of garden mulch that residents will be able to haul away through the spring.
"I think it's a great idea," said Passaic County Agricultural Assistant Elaine Fogerty. "It's benevolent. It's a good way to reuse a natural resource, and it actually cuts down on the work the township has to do."
Many municipalities offer free wood chips when they do annual tree pruning in spring, Fogerty said. But it is generally harder to find this time of year, when gardeners use it to insulate plantings from winter freezes.
Giveaway's different
This giveaway is also different in terms of the quantity and quality of material available, several municipal officials said.
"In the spring, typically, we have light twigs. We have a chipper and we chip them up, and anything big we recycle," Lo Iacono said. "But we're not talking about the kind of volume we have now. This is incredible. I've never, ever seen anything like this before."
Hackensack had so many downed trees in the October storm that city officials had to store them in two city parks, both of which are now full of branches, Lo Iacono said.
Typically the city hauls downed trees in bins to a private recycling company, but at the $738-per-container cost, the city would have to pay close to $40,000 to get rid of all the trees, Lo Iacono said.
So the city arranged to rent the same kind of heavy-duty mulching machine, called a tub grinder, used by professional garden suppliers. The company has estimated that it will cost about $24,000 for the four-day job, and the city will save about $5,000 in spring, the amount of money it usually spends on mulch for city parks and plantings, Lo Iacono said.
So many municipalities statewide had the same idea that the city will have to wait two weeks before the equipment is available, Lo Iacono said.
Maywood also hired a company with an industrial chipper to grind down the hundreds of branches that lined the borough's 21 miles of streets. Any large trunks were chopped into firewood for residents to take, as the borough does every time its DPW workers take down a tree, Borough Manager Thomas Richards said.
Residents appreciate the gesture, he said.
"People who have wood-burning stoves, boy do they know about it," Richards said.
While the borough plans to remove the mulch piles this week, it still has at least 39 trees to chop down, so more wood and mulch will be available soon, Richards said.
Officials in other towns said they have so much wood-chip material, they're having trouble giving it away.
"I will say the township has an abundance of wood chips," said Dean Kazinci, Teaneck's acting township manager. "Residents can take as much as they want."
Kazinci said residents would eventually take care of the two large piles of chips that accumulated after Irene and the Halloween storm.
Insufficient demand
Officials in other municipalities said they weren't sure there would be enough demand for all the wood.
Kevin Kerrigan, foreman of the New Milford Department of Public Works, said town officials are still taking estimates from companies that could grind up the large pile of branches stockpiled at the municipal swim club. But residents' interest in taking the excess mulch will probably play little role in the decision, he said.
"When you have ten truckloads [of wood chips] and someone comes with a wheelbarrow, it just doesn't make that much of a difference," he said.
E-mail: akin@northjersey.com