By Derek Spellman

dspellman@joplinglobe.com

It was painful, but it had to be done, recalled Barbara Lucks, material recovery education coordinator for the city of Springfield.

After an ice storm ravaged Springfield a year ago, the city had to decide how to dispose of all the limbs and other organic debris it collected.

For Springfield, mulching simply was not an option, Lucks said. Springfield’s yard-waste center annually takes in about 175,000 cubic yards of waste, including leaves, brush and tree limbs, that is ground up, she said. The debris collected because of last January’s ice storm, by contrast, totaled about 2 million cubic yards.

“It was just ungodly,” Lucks said of the volume.

So Springfield resorted to burning virtually all of the debris.

“We didn’t like the burning. None of us did,” Lucks said. “In our circumstance, it was the only thing to do.”

It is the same issue that cities such as Joplin, Carthage and Webb City face in the wake of December’s ice storm. The options are to convert the material into mulch or burn it. On the one side are environmental questions, including the benefits of mulching and the health risks associated with large-scale burning. On the other side are questions of logistics, extra costs and a short timeline for getting work done to qualify for state and federal reimbursement for cleanup costs.

Jon Skinner, an urban forester with the Missouri Department of Conservation, said his principal concern with burning would be its potential impact on people with respiratory problems. Even if the burning takes place in a remote part of the city, there is the risk that winds could drive the smoke into areas where there are more people.

Mulch could be used in a variety of ways — for flower beds, walking paths or around trees — but Skinner acknowledged that option would leave the city of Joplin saddled with vast quantities of wood chips at a time when it already has an excess.

Joplin’s choice

Burning is the other option for Joplin, although the City Council has not yet made a decision.

Mary Anne Phillips, the city’s recycling coordinator, said the city is estimating that it will have to dispose of about 400,000 cubic yards of storm debris.

There is the question of where the city would store the debris while it awaits mulching, she said. Then there is the time it would take to grind up that volume of waste. The city already has a stockpile of wood chips unrelated to the storm that it has to distribute, Phillips said.