Lawn Refuse

[inline lawn care]

What Do You With Customers Lawn Clippings? Do You Bag Them And Take Them To The Landfill?

[Marcos]

Bagging clippings here in Ohio is old school. Everyone either uses gator blades to shread the bejesus out of it, or high lift blades to disperse it more evenly onto the already mown areas. If there are times in the spring when some folks have to bag due to heavy rain, the various counties in SW Ohio each have solid waste dump sites where you can get rid of it. I'd check your blue pages in Ga. for solid waste dump sites. They will compost it and probably someday turn it into ethanol! Who knows?

[lawnprosteveo]

I mulch them or side-discharge them. If there is alot of debris, I will go back over it with the mower. This usually gets it small enough to fall into the turf.

[T.E.]

I mulch them or side-discharge them. If there is alot of debris, I will go back over it with the mower. This usually gets it small enough to fall into the turf.

Ditto, we don't bag anything, unless for some odd reason it will make our job easier. Mulching or mainly side discharge with gators on will usually work.

[topsites]

Yes, I refuse.

[ACutAbovesiny]

Id say less than 5% of staten island mulch their lawns...I wish it was more but everyone wants it bagged. We empty the mowers into the back of our dump and haul it off to as recycling center about 25 miles away. In the past the clippings were put in garbage bags and left on the curb but they passed a law in February of this year that prohibits landscapers from doing this. The homeowner will be fined and the lawn service will be ticketed as well. I've heard its $1000 for the homeowner and $2500 for landscapers.

[Marcos]

[QUOTE=ACutAbovesiny;1950836]Id say less than 5% of staten island mulch their lawns...I wish it was more but everyone wants it bagged.

Wow! Thats amazing! Why do you think that's the case? Is it so upscale that people don't want to see a wet blade stuck to their shoe when they get the paper in the morning?

[paponte]

Same here Marco. We mulch all of our commercial accounts, and try to get away with as many residential as possible. Almost all of our residential get bagged, and clippings hauled away and recycled. We mulch all larger areas and properties, but smaller confined areas are just impossible to mulch and make it look decent or even not make a mess of the place.

[Runner]

Our branches, brush, and debris gets dumped in our pile down in the pasture at the back of our property. Occasionally, there are a few other lco's that I allow to dump back there as well. It gets burned yearly, but it hasn't been burned in a few years. I have a pile that is approx. 50 ft. across by around 6 ft. tall. It is going to be a BIG fire that I will be having here, soon.

[RexMan]

We mow 102 lawns weelky and bag 40 of them. We're lucky enough to have 30 acres of land so we have a compost pile. All the grass clipping, leaves, mulch and dirt are put into about a 100' x 100' square.. The pile gets pushed (turned )once a month to keep the docomposition going good. By spring the pile is TOTALLY flat. I then use the black compost for landscape bed build-ups. It's an excellent turn around.

[LB1234]

Very rarely do we bag. Although the past two weeks we had to cause the freakin weather has been nuts. Anyhow, for those that "have to bag"...

We had a customer that used to demand that we bagged the lawn. I keep informing that that it was healthier to mulch/discharge. Whatever, I guess they were old school. We took our mulching deck and mounted a side bag to it. The whole time we were mulching the homeowner thought we were bagging. They never complained again and we didn't bag again.

You can argue about the ethics of it but we weren't charging extra to bag so I was okay with it.

[Marcos]

We mow 102 lawns weelky and bag 40 of them. We're lucky enough to have 30 acres of land so we have a compost pile. All the grass clipping, leaves, mulch and dirt are put into about a 100' x 100' square.. The pile gets pushed (turned )once a month to keep the docomposition going good. By spring the pile is TOTALLY flat. I then use the black compost for landscape bed build-ups. It's an excellent turn around.

Sounds like a great plan, and welcome to LawnSite, RexMan!
:clapping:
I honestly believe that once the technology is tweaked and fine tuned in the processing of various crops for ethanol, that the farmers won't be able to keep up and there will be growing demand for biosolids like clippings and leaves to process into ethanol. The way technology in the field is headed, and the way world markets in energy are headed, I can envision a landscaper in a just a couple years ACTUALLY GETTING PAID to dump their clean load of biosolids at designated sites. But this could be it's own thread....:walking:

[Daddy Joes Lawn Service]

WE bag every customer and burn it on our burn pile!

[ACutAbovesiny]

It sure would be nice to get paid for it rather than paying to dump it.

[Marcos]

It sure would be nice to get paid for it rather than paying to dump it.

FYI-I started a new thread in this forum under the name 'Get paid to dump Grass / Leaves in Future'? to get better attraction to the direction of the conversation and to maybe attract different people's input.