Saw dust

My property is really small. I wish I could compost it. Mostly mine goes in the trash. But when I’m running the planer I end up with a lot more so it goes out on yard waste day and the town picks it up. Saves me a bag and it does get composted. Then I end up buying it back in the spring as mulch because the town dumps it at a local mulching place, who then sells it locally. LOL, I pay twice. Once to get rid of it then again to get it back.

I am guilty. Mine goes to the trash. I cannot put it in the green recycle bin because the bag is plastic and I can’t find one big enough that can go in the compost.
The garbage truck driver was not crazy about about having just dust.

My wife uses some of it to compost, but apparently wood chips/sawdust are a nitrogen sink, which again, apparently is bad for plants…I’ve seen some interesting plans online for a “rocket stove” which burns like a woodstove but uses sawdust, it would be fun to put one together and burn the sawdust.

I vacuum half of it and inhale the rest. Seriously, I did use it with compost some years ago, but I quit with the composting (lazy in my old age) and I use a bio clip mower for the lawn which keeps it fed and green, so I don’t even have grass clippings to compost anymore. I bag up my sawdust and deliver it to the recycling senter where it is composted and then made available to the public for free. Also Manitario is correct about raw sawdust being a nitrogen sink which doesn’t help the plants, but it can help keep the weeds down and also acts as a mulch.

Into the trash… no choice. Small yard and only 1 bag every 2 weeks.
Recycling in my town is not the greatest and taking it to the dump is not feasible.

There is no right or wrong answer and nothing to feel guilty about. If it goes out in the trash, I don’t see a problem with it. After all, it’s just wood, which will decompose very quickly in a landfill. I would rather see bags of sawdust go into a landfill than a truckload of batteries or tons of plastic bottles. I was just curious after realizing how much saw dust my limited activities generate. I suppose if you buy mostly S4S lumber you don’t generate as much as someone who buys rough cut. My planer and jointer are by far the biggest producers.
As for being a Nitrogen sink, that is correct. Never till it directly into the soil. I’m fortunate enough to have 2 acres of grass to cut, and a coop full of chickens. In the spring I also raise meat chickens. That is one animal that poops…a lot! The spring is when I am usually struggling to find enough carbon to keep the compost piles from going N heavy and stinking to high heaven.

Disposal aside, I’m surprised you don’t have some form of dust collection. It drove me so crazy when I first set up that a shop vac DC was one of my first projects. I’m on my 4th iteration (for various reasons) and I plan to build a final one later – a then baffle to offset a height restriction on my orange cone based cyclone.

Mike40….that is hilarious!!! I have often thought that…I went on a tear where I was using MDF a lot!! I am pretty sure I inhaled most of the material needed to make an 8×10 sheet and I wore a mask, used DC, and had air cleaner going!! That stuff is nasty…..

Seriously, I use a lot of walnut and I was told not to use it on plants or anything that would have contact with animals, so even though I do probably more oak, there is still walnut in the bag, so I throw it away.
Mike

I am gobsmacked at the amount of dust my tiny amount of work generates. I collect it in bags and once in a while I take it to the tip. This coming spring I am going to make pathways between the raised beds in my lower (veg) garden so I’m stacking the bags up now. I’m hoping that the weeds will die and the veg beds won’t suffer. I also like the rocket stove (I already use wood exclusively to heat my hot water and central heating via a thermal store), but I’ve no place for one in my shop.

I see how high I can pile it in the back yard. It’s like a monument to woodworking. (I think the squirrels and birds like it, too.)

Mine gets spread in the back yard and compost.

It is amazing how much saw dust is created with power tools and how little is generated with hand tools. That alone has prodded me to use hand tools more and more as time goes on.

I don’t remember where I saw it. A guy posted some picture about his porch having caught fire due to the saw dust self combusting.
A lot of people seemed to agree with him.

A quick google search confirmed the self combusting.

Don’t pile it too high Richforever…

I seem to remember the wood that self combusted was cedar, and there was also some moisture involved.

We had a thread about this once before but it’s been deleted, as well as the nitwit that started it. Unfortunately there was some good information in there as well.

We use 42 gallon trash bags on our dust collectors and fill up 3-4 a week. It all goes in the dumpster. Since we use a variety of woods, there’s really no other option.

I try to be as green as possible, recycling everything I possibly can. That said, I have no way to recycle my sawdust, so it all goes to the landfill. Some farmers around me have a use for it, those who have livestock finishing operations (feeding animals for market). But they buy it by the truckload, and apparently pay big bucks. (The sawdust is for disposal of dead animals)

I am truly lucky where I live, we have an energy from waste plant. They take any raw material including trash and burn it at high temperature to produce high pressure steam. The steam is the used in over 200 buildings in the city, including the regional hospital. They accept wood chips, boards, saw dust etc. at no cost. The down side to my location is the price of wood here, very expensive.

Not so much since I started spending winters in Az, but when I worked in my B.C. Shop in the winter I heated it with a wood stove. Once a fire is going you can (and I did) add a shovel full of sawdust every now and then and it will provide good heat and reduce your firewood consumption.

here is an interesting video showing a sawdust oven in use. It doesn’t have to be a double container or have a drawer to start the fire with at the bottom, but both are nice features. Just a drum with a hole in the bottom and a pipe to the outside are really enough.

Mike, I’ve watched that video several times in the past; it is an interesting stove! I’ve seen similar designs called “rocket stoves”. If I didn’t already have a wood stove in my shop and two in my house, I’d be tempted to build something like that.

I read a blog somewhere by a guy telling about when he was a young apprentice working in a woodshop. His first duty in the morning was to fill up this barrel sawdust oven from the sawdust created the day before. He tamped it into the barrel, etc. like in the video and got it lit. He said it kept the whole shop warm all day and it didn’t cost anything, plus they got the sawdust removed. I seem to remember that several guys worked there, so it must have been a fairly large shop. Personally I would be afraid to use something like this here in Norway because everything is so highly regulated and I wouldn’t want to break any laws or cancel out my insurance. Besides, I recently installed a heat pump system that is quite economical and keeps the temperature in the shop just right. We had it in our living room before that, but it made a whiny noise that I couldn’t hear, that really irritated my wife (she can hear high pitched sounds that most can’t), so we changed it out with a better, more quiet unit and now we are both happier!