The problem of woodwork waste.

[Noel]

Just don't forget this Tiger:

Just so you understand- telling me or indeed anyone else on this site what they should and shouldn't discuss doesn't work and never will. I guarantee that. (REALLY?)

In the vernacular, tell you what Noel,

You rip into me for defending myself against two mickey-takers; one of them a known trouble-maker.
You defend them, and you claim I insulted them. Now you are insulting me (Tiger) That was someone else's expression not mine. Pardon me for borrowing it.
As if all that isn't enough you lay the blame for the whole fiasco at my door, accuse me of insulting them, and make veiled threats.
If that's your judgement, then so be it, but it displays weak powers of discernment.

The 'scuttlebutt' I hear must be true then. All I can do is wonder how many more people you have 'eased' out of the picture.

I will say farewell to all my friends here. It's been nice knowing most of you and I wish you all the best of luck.
I'll get back to my shop, and my own way of working.

I will leave you with Noel, waving his big stick.
Careful you don't put out your own eye in the process Noel.
Cheerio all.

You miss the point. You were telling people what to discuss and what not to discuss:

NO DISCUSSION. So please leave it out.

That is unacceptable.

As for "easing people out" and your scuttlebutt reference care to elaborate?

 

[Richard T]

Dammit! :evil:

 

[condeesteso]

(back to the topic) Any experience composting it? I produce a fair bit, and wife won't let me spread it on borders as it leeches the nitrogen I am told, and further encourages bindweed (very hard to eradicate). I wondered about getting it damp and adding a compost accelerator, but has anyone practical experience or info to help?

 

[Dodge]

I dont have much of a problem with waste, I burn my offcuts and paper/carboard in my woodburner.

bags of chippings/shavings get put outside the end of my building and tend to disappear with the empty bags being returned a few days later - loads of people who come to the gym opposite my workshop keep animals so problem solved.

 

[Benchwayze]

NO DISCUSSION. So please leave it out. You miss the point. You were telling people what to discuss and what not to discuss:

NOT SO. I WAS TELLING OTHERS I DIDN'T WANT TO DISCUSS. READ IT AGAIN... SLOWLY! So you don't miss the point again.


Furthermore , don't attack me from your lofty position, because you feel I insulted your friends. You are supposed to be impartial.

Now please tell me how to delete my account or do it for me.
And if you wish to update yourself on scuttlebutt, try hanging around other woodwork fora for a while.

Enjoy!

 

[Chrispy]

Shavings and sawdust will compost if mixed with an accelerator, I once used pigeon droppings. I made a pallet board box ie. 1.2m cube and filled it layer by layer with shavings poop and wetting it as I built it up, after about a week you could see steam rising from it, and if you stuck your hand in it was really quite hot but to keep it going at that heat you needed to keep turning it over to mix in air which kind of took the fun out of the whole exercise.

Ps my workshop at the time was next to a 400 year old pigeon loft that hadn't been cleaned out for 20 or 30 years.

 

[Jacob]

I'm told good accelerators are **** and ****. Simple to arrange as a composting toilet. Saves water, disposes of sawdust, grows rhubarb, rhubarb is a laxative - it's win win all round!

 

[Woodchips2]

I'm told good accelerators are **** and ****. Simple to arrange as a composting toilet. Saves water, disposes of sawdust, grows rhubarb, rhubarb is a laxative - it's win win all round!

Bob Flowerdew advocates peeing in your compost heap :lol:
Regards Keith

 

[Wildman]

sawdust and wood shavings do compost down they just take a while, I use sawdust in my fish smoker, and the shavings as a mulch around the fruit bushes to prevent weeds. whatever is left over is composted via the normal compost bins or used in the composting dog loo that is on the smallholding. recycle everything and waste nothing, hee hee. (I don't use composted dog manure on the garden though am told it would be ok, just don't fancy it.)

 

[Lons]

I don't use composted dog manure on the garden though am told it would be ok, just don't fancy it.

The dog poo wouldn't bother you at all if you smelled the stuff they spread on the fields around here occasionally :roll: The resulting crops then go off to supermarket and unsuspecting consumers !!!

I think it's called Agrivert. - it's light grey ash, incinerated human waste and they pay the farmers to allow them to dump and spread it. You can smell it for miles around, a choking bloody horrible stink :shock:

Bob

 

[jack55]

Sawdust is an ideal additive to any composting mix, it provides carbon which is needed if the main component of your compost material is grass and or food waste. Chippings will also add structure to a compost pile but will take a while to break down.

By the way if you produce waste as a hobby and not as a business then the council has a statutory duty to remove it along with the rest of the waste. Commercial waste is waste which is produced from a premises used whole as a place of business.

They also cannot make a charge for a householder to use a Household Waste and Recycling Centre, or local skip site or what ever they are called in Englandshire.

Businesses producing sawdust is an entirely different prospect. Any business disposing of waste can only do so at a place licensed to take commercial or industrial waste, and the producer must only assign the waste to an authorised carrier and must provide a Transfer Note which has to be retained for two years. All councils will charge for the collection and disposal of commercial waste, they must however, only recover their costs. Any business producing dust (particularly MDF) which may be harmful to health, has an additional duty of care to ensure they have identified it to the collection company/authority.

Good quality sawdust is expensive to buy!!!

 

[mtr1]

My father(a farmer) told me that wood dust/chippings takes valuable nitrates when it breaks down, so he won't let me use it on the compost heap. But the horsey people don't seem to mind, they just pick it up from the front gate.

 

[DrPhill]

My father(a farmer) told me that wood dust/chippings takes valuable nitrates when it breaks down, so he won't let me use it on the compost heap. But the horsey people don't seem to mind, they just pick it up from the front gate.

The horsey people are not trying to make compost, though, are they?

I am no expert but..... I add sawdust to my compost heap even though I know that the microbes need to use available nitrogen to break down the sawdust (which they do to extract energy, not for our benefit). I just make sure that the compost heap is rich in nitrogen (details not forthcoming!). I think the nitrogen that the bugs remove is only temporarily unavailable - it becomes available again as the bugs die - so the effect is converting some available nitrogen to slow-release nitrogen. The benefits of the added fibre seem to outweigh the effects of delaying nitrogen availability.

Also, burning waste wood products may be better than composting/landfill. Although carbon dioxide adds tothe greenhouse effect, composting may release methane, which is a far more potent greenhouse gas.

In deference to the OP I will not express my opinion that anthropogenic global warming is a dangerous and real threat, and I would hope that he will not extend the argument by rebuttal.

 

[Benchwayze]

In deference to the OP I will not express my opinion that anthropogenic global warming is a dangerous and real threat, and I would hope that he will not extend the argument by rebuttal.

Dr. Phill,

I shouldn’t really dignify your last paragraph with a response.

However, I am not going to allow you to get away with putting words into my mouth. I did NOT say anything about the dangers of Global Warming. Instead I merely made reference to the question of carbon; (CO2/ carbon dioxide), call it what you will. (Check the 'offending' paragraph in my original post, if you wish.)

Secondly, you state that you are not going to offer an opinion on anthropogenic Global warming; then, in the same sentence, you do precisely that.

Thirdly, you ‘hope I won’t rebut you’. (You can hope all you want, sir, but that won’t deny me the right to disagree with you, if I so wish.)

Further, isn’t your last paragraph breaking the very rules, the 'offence' that got me into so much trouble? I.e. presuming to tell me what you think I should or should not post. (Are you watching Noel? This is exactly the 'sin' for which you 'ticked-me-off'. )

Finally Dr. Phill, in relation to the Global Warming, and many other contentious issues of the modern day, I’ll draw your attention to Nicolaus Copernicus. He was once in a minority of one, when he tried to demonstrate that the Earth was not the centre of the Universe. We know better these days.

Now, certainly the Universe doesn’t revolve around me, but then neither does it revolve around you.

Or are you just another one, taking the chance to slip in a bit of sarcasm?

John Walker (Dr. U.O.L)

 

[jack55]

My father(a farmer) told me that wood dust/chippings takes valuable nitrates when it breaks down, so he won't let me use it on the compost heap. But the horsey people don't seem to mind, they just pick it up from the front gate.

Your father was not altogether wrong sawdust is mainly carbon and bacteria need both nitrogen and carbon, but in the composting process there needs to be a much higher ratio of carbon to nitrogen. Given that grass is nitrogen rich it needs plenty of carbon to balance it out. It also needs some structure to allow the air to circulate and the moisture to drain. Excess nitrogen will be lost anyhow as it will be given off as a gas. The key is the carbon has to be easily accessible to the bacteria, sawdust due to its small particle size is good for that (newspapers by the way are not) however it is not good for structure, thats where the chippings can come in. The carbon in wood chippings is not so accessible but provides good structure. Composting by definition is an aerobic process so cannot produce methane, methane is produced in anaerobic conditions.

 

[condeesteso]

Thank you Jack - a clear response to my question !
So if I test a mix of dust (bandsaw say) with chips (planer) and grass, which is growing like crazy at the moment, keep the whole lot damp and work in decent volumes (a cubic metre or so maybe?) I may succeed and have an output my RHS wifey will approve of? I'll give it a go, sneekily behind the workshop.

 

[Paul Chapman]

So if I test a mix of dust (bandsaw say) with chips (planer) and grass, which is growing like crazy at the moment, keep the whole lot damp and work in decent volumes (a cubic metre or so maybe?) I may succeed and have an output my RHS wifey will approve of? I'll give it a go, sneekily behind the workshop.

If nothing else it will make somewhere nice to live, Douglas. My large compost heap consists mainly of grass cuttings, ash from the fire and sawdust and chippings from chainsawing logs. At the moment I have a fox and her four cubs living in it. They are really cute and great fun to watch But it's scared the daylights out of Sparky my cat - I think he used to use it as his toilet but he goes somewhere else now :lol:

Cheers :wink:

Paul

 

[woodbloke]

My large compost heap consists mainly of grass cuttings, ash from the fire and sawdust and chippings from chainsawing logs.

Paul

To go OT for a mo', we've had some interesting discussions on said composting, and it's always a source of amazement to me the way the level keeps dropping in the bin. I just feed mine with green waste from the kitchen (spud peelings etc) bits from the garden and pond (no weeds) and the odd bit of brown stuff (cardboard etc) but I don't put grass in as it tends (or at least I find it does) clog up the works somewhat. It got full at the end of the summer last year and I decided to empty about half of it to make some more space at the top...from the bottom I got out five :shock: old home brew buckets (5 gals each) of loverly brown compost and there was still loads left in the bin - Rob

 

[Eric The Viking]

My frustration with council recycling schemes is that they are so "un-green" it's staggering.

The only work that's been done on it I am aware of* suggests that kerbside-sorted recycling, such as has just been introduced here in Bristol, is nine times more expensive than properly managed landfill.

The key term in this context is 'properly managed'. That means lined to prevent leaching, monitored and having other emissions such as methane properly vented and collected.

Expensive inevitably means energy inefficient, and that means not green. It's all very well saying 'but we've saved such-and-such going into landfill', but for what purpose and at what energy/environmental cost in doing so?

For example, there is so much paper and cardboard being 'recycled' nowadays, likewise plastics, that there is barely any market for it. Bristol's waste paper is baled and taken to Kent(!) presumably for processing, but possibly incineration. Because of EU regulations banning the use of 'recycled' plastics in food packaging, there is hardly any uses for that. There are recycled plastics products, for example some sorts of home insulation, and clothing fabrics, but large amounts of it are simply packed as densely as possible and stored (or so I understand).

Why isn't this 'green'? Because we are sorting and storing stuff we effectively have no use for. We are using scarce resources to do a pointless task! Far better, IMHO, to put it into landfill, properly managed, until such time as either a commercially viable market opens up, or we develop an energy-efficient method of recycling it.

Better still, of course, is to deal with consumer packaging issues at source, by being much tougher on the companies creating the waste in the first place. Personally I'd like to see a law making it illegal to demand failed goods were returned 'in the original packaging,' and making it an absolute right for consumers to leave all packaging behind at the store at the time items are bought.

Crazy world, innit?

E.


*The US-based Mises Institute, economic think-tank, although they were quoting a primary source I can't remember.

 

[Lons]

Better still, of course, is to deal with consumer packaging issues at source, by being much tougher on the companies creating the waste in the first place. Personally I'd like to see a law making it illegal to demand failed goods were returned 'in the original packaging,' and making it an absolute right for consumers to leave all packaging behind at the store at the time items are bought. E.

=D> =D> Exactly the way forward Eric.

But... it isn't going to happen as there are much more poweful forces at work for political reasons rather than ecological. Such is the world we live in :roll:

As for the original composting question....................
I don't actively compost these days apart from a huge heap of grass cuttings in the field to which I often add cuttings and thin branches as well as soil at times. It does come out eventually as usable stuff however when I did have a proper compost heap, I used to add powder product which was sold as an accelerator. How did that work then?

Bob