Almost every day, the BG crew collects excess leaves that could not be mulched and returned to the landscapes they came from.   We also haul away invasive plants, winter cuttings from dormant perennials, fallen limbs, tilled up lawn grass to make way for new native beds, weeds, carcasses of dead trees and shrubs, and more weeds; most of that year round.  What happens to all that stuff?

Most of it is wrapped in reusable jute tarps, or bundled as bulk limbs, or stuffed in plastic leaf bags or reusable plastic pots, and hauled to our lot in East Austin.  Every week or two, we load a truck and trailer with the accumulated treasure, and haul it to a brush recycling facility about 5 miles from the lot.  The frequency of these trips is an excellent measuring stick for how busy we are; and brother, there ain’t no stick big enough right now.  We’ve make weekly trips this spring, with the big trailer and truck stuffed with about 20 cubic yards of brush each time.  Last year, we collected about 675 cubic yards, enough to fill a large house with no walls from floor to ceiling, packed tight.

The brush recyclers use huge cranes with grapple attachments to drop the brush into massive industrial tub grinders, which spit out the shredded brush into massive 30-foot mountains. The mountains are watered, and allowed to age for up to one year.  At that stage, we buy it back from the recyclers; only this time, we call it “mulch.”

This closed-loop process is so common, that most of the bagged mulches available at places like your local Home Depot are actually sourced from Austin brush recycling facilities.  Buying directly from the source, in bulk, helps make the loop even smaller.

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