Land clearing

Land Clearing and Red Clay: Sizing the Job Properly

Clay is the most expensive thing on a land clearing job and almost nobody accounts for it. Here is how to keep it from wrecking your budget.

Why clay is the hidden cost

On a land clearing job, people budget for the trees. The trees are rarely the problem. The problem is what comes up with them.

Georgia Piedmont red clay is dense, and it holds water, which makes it denser. It clings to root balls, it comes up with stumps, it fills the void around old fence posts, and it sits invisibly in the bottom of a container adding tonnage that nobody accounted for.

This is the single most common overage we see on yard and clearing work here, and it is almost entirely avoidable.

How much a root ball actually weighs

Worth being concrete, because the intuition is badly wrong.

Soil runs roughly 2,000 to 2,700 pounds per cubic yard depending on how wet it is. Wood, by contrast, is a fraction of that once you account for all the air trapped in a pile of limbs.

So a modest root ball with clay still packed into it can weigh several times what the same volume of clean brush weighs. Half a dozen of those in a 20 yard and you are at the weight allowance with the container looking barely used.

The fix is free: knock and shake the clay off root balls before they go in. Leave them out in the sun for a few days if the schedule allows and the clay dries and falls away far more easily. The difference on a full clearing job is measured in tons.

The local inert route

Here is the genuinely good news, and it is better than what most markets we work in offer.

There is an inert recycling facility on Highway 81 in Loganville that accepts and recycles earth and earth-like products, concrete, cured asphalt, rock, bricks, yard trimmings, and land clearing debris including stumps, limbs and leaves. It also sells clean fill, sand, dirt, gravel and crusher run — so the material genuinely goes back out and gets used.

That means clearing debris does not have to go into an expensive mixed C&D stream at all, provided you keep it clean. There is also an inert landfill in Loganville taking construction and demolition debris, and the Walton County landfill out on Highway 78.

Practically, on a clearing job of any size, this is where the savings are. Two containers — one for clean clearing debris and inert material, one for everything else — will usually cost less in total than one mixed 30 yard, even after paying for the extra movement.

What counts as clean inert

The word doing all the work in the section above is clean. It is worth being precise.

Clean inert generally means: earth and clay, concrete, cured asphalt, rock, brick, and clean vegetation — stumps, limbs, leaves, yard trimmings.

What ruins it: treated timber, painted or coated material, drywall, plastic sheeting, landscape fabric, fencing wire, general household rubbish, and the lunch waste that finds its way into every open container on a job site.

One realistic caution: root balls bring soil, and soil is inert, so that combination is fine. But they also often bring landscape fabric, old irrigation line, wire and buried rubbish, and that is what downgrades the load. Give the pile a look before it goes.

Stumps, limbs and leaves

All three are accepted at the inert facility, and all three behave differently in a container.

Stumps are the heavy one because of the clay. Shake them out. A large stump genuinely warrants its own small container rather than going in with light material.

Limbs and brush are the opposite: they trap enormous quantities of air and refuse to stack. A pile that looks like a pickup load routinely needs a 20 yard. Cutting to shorter lengths as you load nearly doubles what fits, and loading deliberately — filling gaps rather than building a lattice — makes a substantial difference.

Leaves compact well and are light, but they hold water. A container of leaves left open through a wet week gains real weight.

Green wood is also heavy with water. If a pile can dry for a week before the container arrives, it costs you less.

What the city will and will not take

Inside Loganville city limits there is a yard waste service, and its limits are specific:

• Small yard waste — leaves and grass clippings — in brown paper bags, curbside by 7am on your collection day or the night before
• Maximum ten paper bags per week
• No mulch or pine straw can be collected at all
• Larger material goes to the city chipper on its own schedule — there is a dedicated line for questions about limbs and pile size

Ten bags a week handles ordinary lawn maintenance. It does not handle a clearing job, a big storm clean-up, or a pine straw replacement, and it certainly does not handle stumps or soil.

Outside city limits there is no curbside yard waste service at all. Unincorporated Walton households are on the pay-per-bag Green Bag system, which is for household refuse, not brush.

Sizing a clearing job

• A few shrubs and a small tree: 15 yard
• One mature tree down, cut up: 20 to 30 yard on its own
• Clearing a residential lot: 30 yard plus a swap, or two containers split by stream
• Stumps and soil: a 10 yard, part-filled, separate from everything else
• Old fence line removal: 15 yard, and expect clay on every post

The rule of thumb that works: size vegetation up, size soil down. If you have both, that is a strong argument for two containers rather than one.

Timing it around the weather

Three practical points, all of them about clay and water.

Clear in a dry spell if you can choose. Clay that has taken sustained rain can be half again as heavy as the same volume dry, and you pay for that water by the ton.

Let piles dry before the container arrives. A week of sun on a stump pile takes real weight out of it and loosens the clay so it falls away.

Watch the ground for access. A lawn or gravel approach that carries a loaded truck comfortably in September may not in February. We would rather move the placement than rut your property, and we will say so when you book. More on placement and surfaces here.