Ash Utilization Options Project of Southeast Michigan

LaMont Brothers Tree Service Backgrounder

LaMont Brothers Tree Service has been awarded a grant of $50,000 to purchase a new Wood-Mizer sawmill and to obtain further training on sawing for grade lumber. This new mill will allow the experienced company to provide a pivotal leadership role in the ongoing efforts to utilize harvested urban ash wood in Southeast Michigan.

LaMont Brothers had seen the need for wood waste management in this area long before Michigan's outbreak of the emerald ash borer caused a surplus of harvested urban ash logs. Consequently, the tree service company has been practicing internal resource recovery on a small scale for years, milling logs from their own tree removal and land clearing waste into lumber. One major market for this reclaimed lumber has been local woodworkers who often sought out the specialty wood types that were available from LaMont Brothers' efforts. However, the overall scale of this lumber production operation was quite limited due to a lack of adequate equipment -- they had been using only an Oscar hobby band mill for the last five years. The grant funding from RC&D, and the equipment that it has purchased, will allow the company to expand both this recycling initiative and their business as a whole.

The business is currently under contract with the Michigan Department of Agriculture (MDA) to grind emerald ash borer-infested material (along with other green waste) at their approved marshalling site in Whitmore Lake, MI. All ground wood material is then sent to Genessee Power Station to be used as fuel in their co-generation facility. While maintaining this existing grinding operation, LaMont Brothers expects that the new equipment they have purchased and the company's resulting expansion in services will generate seven new well-paid permanent positions for skilled workers. These new capabilities will allow LaMont Brothers to extract logs from the MDA disposal site waste stream to produce grade lumber and green railroad tie blanks, which will be purchased by Webster Industries of Wisconsin. Extracting these logs and producing higher value products will, in addition to creating new jobs and reducing the burden on landfills, also:

• satisfy the "value-added production" portion of their contract with MDA,
• reduce the volume of the ash wood waste needing to be ground, therefore significantly lessening the heavy burden of disposal costs paid by the state, and
• create a new supply of resources available to address the current high demand for railroad ties, a market expected to thrive for at least the next five years as the new housing and home improvement markets remain strong and continue to consume the majority of available wood resources.

The marshalling site operated by LaMont Brothers will continue to be a permanent full-time operation after EAB has been eradicated, ideally continuing to produce lumber and other value-added products from removed urban trees. The company hopes that the current opportunity presented by the EAB problem will be a starting point for the local green industry to fully address the potential in utilizing the urban wood resources that have long been ignored by careless waste management.

A project of the Southeast MI RC&D