A former Western Washington logger and land-clearing contractor has found a way to generate income from clean wood wasteby converting it into brightly colored landscaping mulch.


The affable, slightly zany entrepreneur, Tim Davison, is producing the mulch through a young Spokane-based company called Spectrum Landscape Accents that he manages and that he convinced a silent investor to finance.


Its been really positive, he says.


Spectrum has sold probably a couple of thousand cubic yards of the mulch, both directly and through a number of Inland Northwest landscape-supply retailers, since it began marketing the product three months ago, and it has begun exploring the feasibility of expanding into more-distant markets, Davison says.


The mulch, which looks much like bark, is made from wood pallets and other recycled lumber that simultaneously is shredded and injected with long-lasting, environmentally safe colorants developed by Bayer Corp., he says. Until a few years ago, the colorants, or dyes, had been used almost exclusively to add color to dog and cat foods, he says.


The mulch is available in 11 colorsmahogany, dark red, light red, gold, blue, dark brown, light brown, green, black, yellow, and orange. It sells for around $25 a cubic yard, which makes it comparable to, or slightly more expensive than premium large-nugget bark used for landscaping, and about twice as expensive as typically priced fine bark, but less expensive than red rock, which sells for more than $30 a yard.


Citing the performance of colored mulch in the Southeastern U.S., Davison claims the mulch will retain its color three to five times longer than bark because of the coating thats applied. He claims it also will last longer before disintegrating because its denser and doesnt contain the sugar that bark does, making it less expensive than bark over the long run.


Although Davison doesnt own Spectrum, he produces the companys mulch at an eight-acre, waste-recycling-and-transfer facility north of Hillyard that he owns and operates through a 2-year-old company called Diversified Recycling Inc.


He says Diversified Recycling and the separately owned Spectrum both are affiliates of Davison Ranch Inc., a land-clearing company that he formed a number of years ago after moving to the Deer Park area from Western Washington.


Davison opened Diversified Recycling after starting to do contract-clearing work here and realizing that the timber and undergrowth in this area were enough sparser and more scattered than in Western Washington that it made sense to set up a central collection point for such materials and let some of the customers do their own clearing and bring recyclable materials to him.


At its property at 8716 N. Greene Lane, just east of Market Street, the company charges customers $4 to $8 a yard to dump materials such as clean lumber, grass, limbs, stumps, and logs. It trucks much of the combustible materialaside from that converted to mulchto waste-burning, electrical-generating plants in Kettle Falls, Wash., and Lewiston, Idaho.


The company also sells some landscaping materials at its property on Greene Lane, such as fill dirt, landscaping rocks, and the colored mulch, and plans to expand that to include other materials.


Developing his own system


Davison says he got the idea for the colored mulch about five years ago at a forestry exposition in Atlanta, and that the original process was developed by a company in the Eastern U.S.


Rather than buy expensive new equipment that was being marketed specifically to make the colored mulch, he says he decided to develop his own system, starting with a big, trailer-mounted tub grinder he already owned and adding other pieces of equipment for drying, coloring, and conveying the mulch. Davison says the setup he designed and built forces the pigment into the wood, by pulverizing the shredded wood a second time after it has been injected with dye, rather than simply painting the wood. Strung end to end, the various pieces of equipment he uses to make the colored mulch create about a 170-foot-long production line, he says.


Davison says also that he went through a laborious trial-and-error process to achieve the optimum dye-to-water mix to keep the color from bleeding off the wood.


Theres this magic point (at which the mix is just right), and weve invented the equipment to do that, Davison claims.


He and Shirley Hinkley, Spectrums sales manager, say they believe Spectrum is the first company west of the Mississippi River to begin producing the color-enhanced mulch, although theyre already hearing rumblings that another company may be gearing up to compete with them here.


Exposure at home shows and highly visible commercial locations where the mulch has been applied have helped boost early sales of the product, they say. When you see it on the ground (at homes and businesses), thats what sells it, Hinkley says.


Spectrums mahogany-colored mulch thus far has been its top seller by a wide margin, she and Davison say. They say, though, that they believe other colors will achieve more widespread use once people grow accustomed to seeing them or find particular applications for them.


Some people may regard the colored mulch as too unnatural or garish to be aesthetically pleasing as a landscaping material, but Hinkley says, It just brings contrast. It brings character to the home or business. It stands out from everything else, and getting noticed, she adds, is half the battle in sales.


Businesses here that so far have chosen to jazz up their outside dcor with a layer of the colored mulch range from Accent Interiors Inc., at 905 E. Hastings, to D. Lishs Hamburgers, at 1625 N. Division. The mulch also has been installed at a number of McDonalds fast-food restaurants in the Spokane area, and Hinkley says other McDonalds restaurants here may be receiving it before long as well.


Debbie Thompson, of Accent Interiors, says, It definitely stands out. We get a lot of people stopping, looking, and asking about it.


Hinkley isnt surprised at how well the mulch has been selling, despite comparatively minimal marketing. I pretty much knew that it was going to fly, she says. Its been great. Weve had a lot of positive response. Based on the demand so far, its like the pet rock of the 70s to me. It gives me goose bumps.


Davison is a hyperactive, yet gregarious sort of guy who says he doesnt sleep a lot. An outdoor workaholic with an obvious aptitude for understanding, building, and customizing machinery, his mind seems to process information in about the same way that his big tub grinder randomly chews up and spits out wood.


Ive got wrecking yards behind me full of ideas for inventions and business ventures that never came to fruition, he says. This time, though, he thinks he may have found an idea that will avoid the wrecking yard, at least for a while.


Im guessing that in five years, he says, the mulch will be the biggest part of our business.