Waste Material Disposal

[pelligrini]

What do y'all do with your waste material?

Now that I'm spending a lot more time in my shop, and not just using S4S stock I am ending up with a lot of wood pieces to get rid of. I am pretty bad about holding on to any remotely usable cutoff though. I used to just blow the chips and dust from my tablesaw & router into the backyard grass. Whatever got collected in the shopvac would go into a regular trash bag. I finally got a chip collection set up for the planer because the chips were starting to get deeper than the grass. I am using a Ryobi dust bag on my saw now since I am doing quite a bit more ripping.

My wife likes for me to give her the chips and she'll use them in her garden, but she hasn't even seen the full 45gal container yet. I've got a bunch of junk wood cutoffs to dispose of too. I could probably mix them in with the weekly trash. I never really do a fire, so they wouldn't be saved for that.

[shoottx]

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[Copper]

My wife likes for me to give her the chips and she'll use them in her garden, but she hasn't even seen the full 45gal container yet.

Be careful using wood chips in the garden. The microbes that break down wood use a lot of nitrogen (more than the chips provide), which means less for the plants. It might be okay as a mulch to hold in moisture, but don't work it into the soil without adding more nitrogen than usual. The carbon to nitrogen ratio of wood chips is something like 300:1. They also acidify the soil which is great for evergreens, but not for many vegetables. I hate to have your wife blaming you for yellow plants. Oh, and definitely don't use black walnut chips in the garden. They're toxic to everything.

Most of my sawdust and chips are in my shop vac. I just empty them into the garbage. I'm a pack rat when it comes to cut offs. I need to get rid of most of them, but I always have a voice in my head that makes me think that I might have a use for them in the future.

[LarryG]

Sawdust and chips, from the dust collector and the shop vac, get burned on the brush pile.

I'm another packrat who has a hard time throwing away anything that's potentially useful; and the more expensive the material, the smaller the piece I'll save. All my scraps -- meaning the very smallest pieces, not offcuts large enough to go into the rack -- go into one of several big plastic tubs that are all eternally on the ragged edge of overflowing. When one of these gets heaped so high that pieces start sliding off onto the floor, I dump the contents onto the floor and cull out the more questionable pieces until the tub is 1/2 to 3/4 full. Then I start the cycle anew.

[dbhost]

I have been known to take wood chips / sawdust from the shop vac, collection bags, along with cutoffs too small to be useful, and bag them up in paper sacks along with dryer lint, etc... and burning them on the campfire during hunting season... They make excellent kindling.

[Tom Slick]

sawdust goes in the compost pile. solid stock goes in the green waste container (muni pickup) MDF, OSB, ply goes in the trash.

FYI wood chips/sawdust is much more beneficial after they are composted. as mentioned they use alot of nitrogen when breaking down, taking it away from your plants.

[steve-norrell]

Many, many years ago, when we lived down in 'southern America', we used to use sawdust to augment the soil. The soil where we lived was almost all clay and we roto-tilled sawdust from local mills into it for lawns and gardens. That usually worked well, if, as mentioned in the previous posts, we added lots of high nitrogen fertilizer.

Now, it gets collected and taken to the landfill. We don't even use it for mulch because we have plenty of raw plant clippings for that.

Regards, Steve

[ksum]

I have a central dust collection system and everything from there goes into a bag and off to our landfill. Wait! One part of our landfill is a yard waste recycling center. They take big branches, etc, and make mulch. The smaller stuff is ground up and turned into compost. And what do they do with all that? If you live in the county, you can go and get a as much mulch as you want for free if you shovel it, or pay $10 for a pickup truck load if they use their loader to fill you up. Same with the compost!

For the short scraps, I burn them on our deck in a chimanea. Got a longer scrap? I cut it short...

Karl

[Thalermade]

Once I was able to doante sawdust to the local elementary school for some project they had for the kids.

But usually the sawdust goes to Mt. Rumpke (local landfill).
As others have claimed, I also have a difficult time eliminating the reduced size stock. (Which in my case is an inherited trait).

I have an old 30 gallon Shell Oil grease barrel which usually is full of longer pieces.

Some goes to the fire pit (infrequent usage). Some gets cut up to be used as paint stirs (stirrers?), two sizes- one for quarts and one for gallons.
I also have a collection of reduced sizes of MDF and plywood.

I am finally getting rid of the small bucket of painted trim cut-offs from 4 years ago when I finished the basement.

Russ

[just started]

It is genetically impossible for me to throw out anything larger than the palm of my hand, so I am looking for projects that require little chunks to start with.

[ironhat]

Sawdust and chips, from the dust collector and the shop vac, get burned on the brush pile.

I'm another packrat who has a hard time throwing away anything that's potentially useful; and the more expensive the material, the smaller the piece I'll save. All my scraps -- meaning the very smallest pieces, not offcuts large enough to go into the rack -- go into one of several big plastic tubs that are all eternally on the ragged edge of overflowing. When one of these gets heaped so high that pieces start sliding off onto the floor, I dump the contents onto the floor and cull out the more questionable pieces until the tub is 1/2 to 3/4 full. Then I start the cycle anew.

A well thought-out plan. Concise, deliberate, simple yet, effective. A true marvel of intuitive thought. In other words, that's what I do, down to the barrel !!

[drumpriest]

I am trying to get over keeping all of the really small scraps. I have a tendancy to horde them. Fortunately this year we got an outdoor fire pit inset into a metal and stone table. Makes for good marshmallow cook outs, and has started to consume a lot of my smaller scraps. I look forward to autumn's events claiming all of the little cherry bits left over from my last couple of projects.

I am trying to find a place to dispose of my un-used finishes that are bad. I have switched over to 95% water based spray lacquer, and I have a bunch of old oil/poly blends, and some old brushing acrylics that I need to rid myself of, and it seems that in the burgh here, they do a collection once every other month or so as a special event. Considering how much poly gets sold out of the box stores, I can't hardly believe that's the setup for proper disposal, it's just sad!

[poolhound]

I used to only have a shop vac and my life got a lot easier when I got a DC. Its one with the disposable plastic bags so when it gets full I just tie it up and it goes in the trash. I still use the vac for small tools and that just gets emptied direct into the trash.

I am also a packrat where cutoffs are concerned. I have two cut off bins. One that has three sections to accomodate different lengths and a low one that all the small pieces go into. Larger cutoffs tend to get stacked against the walls.

When I get really small pieces they go straight in the trash. We also have a fire pit so some that I cant see a use for go into a pile that will help feed the fire come winter.

[cabinetman]

I'm another one that has problems throwing away anything that can be used for anything. Cutoffs so to speak are kept in sized groups, in 55 gallon drums. Chips and shavings from the planer and jointer get bagged and sold to stables in the area and get picked up weekly. Certain woods are toxic to hoofed animals, mostly wood species with food names, like Cherry, Walnut. Sawdust gets separated and bagged and sold to car repair shops for cleaning their floors. The rest of the waste goes into a recycle dumpster and picked up twice a month.
.

[Wood_workur]

wood scraps big enough to be used (aka bigger than a finger) are kept, the rest go into the wood pile for kindling.

sawdust is vacuumed up and thrown away gets mixed with toom uch crap to be used as mulch.