Burning vs. mulching

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January 14, 2008

Cities looking to balance cost, environment in debris cleanup

Anonymous The Joplin Globe Mon Jan 14, 2008, 08:01 AM CST

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.

“We already had a huge supply of wood chips several weeks before the ice storm,” she said.

Timing looms as a key factor, particularly if the city seeks assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the State Emergency Management Agency. The city is eligible to be reimbursed for up to 85 percent of cleanup costs, and FEMA allows six months for the work to be completed, Phillips said.

“Last year, we were pushing it right up to the last minute,” she said of cleanup from the January 2007 ice storm.

Finances also come into play because it is more expensive to grind up the debris than to burn it, according to city officials.

Joplin officials estimate the city would save at least $250,000 by burning the debris rather than mulching it, based on the bids it has received for both types of work, Phillips said.

Lucks, at Springfield, said it would have cost an additional $1.5 million to mulch the debris from last year’s storm instead of burning it. Even with 85 percent of the cost reimbursed, the city would have incurred an additional $225,000 in costs, she said. The total bill for removing and disposing of storm debris in Springfield and Greene County came to about $19 million, according to Lucks.

David Hertzberg, Joplin public works director, said the City Council likely will decide at a meeting later this month how to dispose of the storm debris.

Other cities

Webb City officials would prefer to mulch their city’s yard waste if possible, said City Administrator Steve Garrett.

Webb City does not have a mulcher that could accommodate the estimated 100,000 cubic yards of waste that ultimately will be gathered from the city, but Garrett said he hopes the Environmental Protection Agency will grind up the debris for use in land-reclamation projects it has under way in the Webb City area. If not, Webb City likely will have to burn its waste, he said.

The cities of Pittsburg, Kan., and Carthage have decided to burn their debris, but not every city has taken that route.

Neosho accumulated about 120,000 cubic yards of debris after the January 2007 ice storm and chose to mulch the materials, said Bobby Gregg, the city’s emergency management director. Gregg said it cost the city about $120,000 to grind up the waste. He said he did not know how much it would have cost to burn, but he said burning that much wood would have released significant amounts of carbon dioxide into the air.

“What is our environment worth to us?” Gregg asked.

And, there was the fear that the smoke would drift into populated areas and cause breathing problems for people, particularly those with respiratory problems, he said.

Staff writer Susan Redden contributed to this report.

By the numbers

As of Thursday, crews in Joplin had collected 65,248 cubic yards of storm debris in the city. The city estimates that crews have finished work in a majority of the west side of town on their initial sweep. Crews will make a second sweep through the city after the first one is complete.