Arboriculture & Urban Forestry 39(1): January 2013 Arboriculture & Urban Forestry 2013. 39(1): 25–30 25 Conversion Efficiency and Economics of Urban Wood Utilization Craig A. Tinus and Michael LaMana Abstract. Because of changes in land-use zoning, many standard forest management activities are no longer possible in urban and subur- ban woodland properties being developed. This trend has created an influx of wood fiber into municipal landfills at significant cost to both land- owners and municipalities. An alternative to landfill or other off-site disposal was evaluated that returned wood products to the landown- er in a fee-for-service business model. Additionally, the cost for removal was modeled in comparison to the potential value of the wood as lumber. In a case study, the overall average marginal difference to the landowner for material removal was a cost of USD $35 from all job sites (n = 21); which was essentially break-even. This approach was cost competitive with landfill disposal, and landowners were able to benefit from wood products derived from trees that were being removed because of site development. Additionally, these landowners were preferentially choosing a form of material recycling that likely reduced the load to municipal waste disposal sites, and as such was a benefit to the community. Key Words. Avoided Disposal; Hedonic Valuation; Log; Lumber; Municipal; Recycling; Sawmill; Wood Waste. Significant amounts of wood volume requiring manage- ment is found in urban, and increasingly geographically diffuse suburban, areas the northeastern United States (McPherson et al. 2005). In many communities, urban trees are considered beneficial (Gorman 2004; McPher- son et al. 2005) and this is reflected in the prevalence of tree preservation ordinances. In addition to urban trees, changes in zoning have created small wooded property lots where traditional tree harvesting techniques are either impractical or not allowed. However, typical site prepara- tion for development creates significant volumes of wood waste products that are typically diverted to landfill sites. Urban and suburban landowners often favor de facto street tree preservation as well as minimal, selective harvest oppor- tunities of small woodlots for both practical and social rea- sons (Sabor et al. 2003). These trends are increasing the num- ber and volume of trees comprising the urban forest, and are likely to continue because of both local interests and in creat- ing carbon-offsets (Pataki et al. 2006) and forest conservation. The highly valued urban forest does provide many benefits, but at a cost. One direct cost to communities and other land- owners is disposal, when trees need to be removed. Direct costs for disposal of unwanted woody materials are often signifi- cantly greater because of large, log-sized trunk wood. However, disposal of this trunk wood underutilizes a potential resource. Harvested urban trees offer potential commodity-yield, even con- sidering the potential presence of defects and contaminants and wide geographical distribution. Recovery of value-added forest products is economically feasible and of interest to both property owners and public institutions, particularly those with education and outreach as part of mandates or mission statements (unpub- lished data). For example, previous authors have qualitatively documented a variety of creative approaches to the utilization of wood from harvested urban and suburban trees (Cesa et al. 1994; Lempicki and Cesa 2000; Bratkovich 2001; Sherrill 2003). Many of the urban wood recovery and utilization strategies these authors described have been implemented in differing locales and over different timeframes. However, the operational and economic efficiency of such operations is poorly understood. Broader adoption of, and investment in, urban tree utilization operations are likely to increase if they are consistently cost effective. Researchers analyzed data from Citilog, Inc., an urban tree utilization and secondary processing company based in north- ern New Jersey, U.S. Using data from sites in the District of Columbia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, U.S., researchers evaluated selected elements of the urban-log recovery process with the following objectives: 1) to document the lumber recovery factor (LRF) and contamina- tion prevalence of logs derived from harvested urban trees that would have otherwise been disposed of as waste or used as a source of firewood and landscape mulch; 2) determine whether recovery of forest products, such as lumber from study logs, was profitable as a stand-alone endeavor, or whether milling of study logs was subsidized by values added by upstream and downstream processes; and 3) quantify the value of avoided dis- posal (e.g., waste hauling and landfill tipping fees) and to deter- mine the degree to which such avoided tree disposal costs were a functional subsidy to utilization and processing of urban logs. MATERIALS AND METHODS For all study sites, a fee-for-service model was used wherein cus- tomers retained ownership of all logs as well as any wood prod- ucts. This approach is unlike traditional sawmills that purchase ©2013 International Society of Arboriculture
January 2013
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