Page 37 - Moving the Earth_ The Workbook of Excavation

LAND CLEARING AND CONTROLS

LAND CLEARING AND CONTROLS 1.37

be disposed of while clearing a site have been trucked off to landfill disposal areas. In addition to
the loading and hauling costs, the landfill owners might have charged $30, or so, to dump a load
on the landfill. Recently, that part of the cost has been climbing steadily and may now be as much
as $400 per load. With such a high cost there has been an incentive to develop other means for
disposing of the wood growth on the land to be cleared.

Special Equipment. Brush and limb chippers have been used extensively for reducing small sizes and
quantities to wood chips. The material created in this way generally is small in quantity and is left on
the site for ground cover. However, this type of equipment cannot handle stumps and other large logs.
To handle and dispose of large quantities and sizes of wood, a different type of equipment is needed.
A heavy-duty wood-processing and stump grinder had to be developed. The challenge was met
by Morbark with a piece of machinery called a waste recycler. It is a towable wastewood pro-
cessing machine with a carbide knife cutting wheel in the tub powered by a 650-horsepower diesel
engine. The piece of equipment is rigged with a full-circle-rotating, grapple knuckle-boom for
self-loading the material to be ground into chips. See Fig. 1.29. Other manufacturers are now
making this kind of wood-processing equipment.
One contractor has mounted the waste-processing machine on a crawler track undercarriage so that
the machine can be pulled around a large site. This eliminates some of the problems of hauling the tim-
ber trash to a central disposal point, saving on labor costs and avoiding a large pile of mulch material.

BURNING STUMPS

In the Ground. Dead, dry stumps can sometimes be burned without taking them out of the
ground, but the process is usually slow and laborious.

FIGURE 1.29 Waste recycling chipper. (Courtesy of Morbark Industries, Inc.)