Yard Waste Removal Calgary

Why sod and soil are heavier than they look

This surprises people every time. A cubic yard of soil weighs roughly a tonne. Sod is soil plus grass plus water, and it is heavier still — a single roll of freshly cut sod is around 15 to 20 kilograms, and stripping a modest front lawn produces dozens of them.

That is why a small-looking pile of sod costs more to dispose of than a mountain of branches. Landfill tipping is by weight, and dense wet material is the most expensive kind.

It also means a bin full of soil hits its legal haul weight long before it is physically full. If your project is producing soil or sod in quantity, say so when you call — we will size it correctly rather than deliver a bin you cannot legally fill.

Clean yard waste goes to compost, not landfill

This is the one genuinely good news item in disposal. Clean organic yard waste — branches, leaves, grass, brush, untreated wood — goes to a composting facility rather than the landfill. It is cheaper to tip and it is a genuinely better outcome.

The word doing the work there is clean. A load of branches with a broken plastic planter, a roll of landscape fabric and half a bag of concrete mix in it is no longer a compost load, and it gets landfilled at landfill prices.

So it is worth keeping the piles separate if you can. Organic material in one pile, everything else in another. It takes you no extra effort and it lowers the cost of the job.

Spring cleanups and storm damage

Calgary yard waste work is seasonal and it clusters. Late April and May are the spring cleanup rush, when everyone deals with a winter's worth of accumulation at once. September and October bring the fall cleanup.

Storm damage is the unpredictable one. A heavy wet snowfall in September, before the leaves have dropped, will take branches off half the mature trees in the older neighbourhoods — the 2014 storm that hit Calgary is still the reference point. After an event like that, everyone calls at once.

If you are dealing with storm damage, call early. And if a limb is on a power line, that is Enmax's job before it is anybody else's — do not go near it.

Fences, decks and landscaping teardowns

A lot of yard waste jobs are not really organic material at all. Pulling out an old fence, taking down a rotten deck or ripping out landscaping produces treated lumber, posts set in concrete, wire, landscape fabric and rock.

Treated lumber and painted wood cannot go into compost and has to be landfilled. Concrete footings are heavy. Landscaping rock is very heavy. All of that is normal work for us, but it prices differently from a load of branches, so it is worth mentioning on the call.

If the fence or deck still has to come down, that is demolition work and we do that too — it saves you doing the teardown yourself and then paying for a separate haul.