Local business takes burnt trees for free
With people finally able to go in and clean up after the Charlotte Fire, many residents are looking to remove as many trees from their property as possible.
Zane Buffi at Backatcha LLC is reminding people that they can bring their trees, burned or not, to him for free.
“We started out as a composting facility so our motto was, ‘We’re bringing waste Backatcha'” Buffi said about how the company got its name.
His sign at the end of Reservation Road is up all the time, because Buffi is taking trees from sunrise to sunset, seven days a week. He takes the trees and turns them into mulch. People can buy it to landscape their houses, but he sells much of the mulch to an energy company.
“We grind it up with our grinder and we haul it to a local company here in Idaho that further burns it down in a boiler and they produce electricity and steam out of it,” Buffi said.
With acres of burnt trees in Mink Creek, Buffi wants people to know that his gates are open. Rather than have to pay the landfill to dump their trees, people can leave their lumber with him free of charge, he said. He makes up for the cost when he sells the mulch.
“Keeping it out of the landfill is one of our main goals. There’s a lot of wood … that goes into the landfill that just goes into a hole in the ground, gets buried up, and 10, 15, 20 years, 50 years down the road, we have to start building another landfill,” he said.
And Buffi said he’ll take anything.
“The people that are up there they’re suffering enough. They’ve got houses they need to rebuild, they’ve got to choose whether or not they’re going to rebuild, and we’re just trying to provide a service to help them out to bring that wood to us and get some use out of it,” he said.
People can take wood to Backatcha seven days a week from 6 a.m. until dark. Buffi’s house is the last house on the left at the end of Reservation Road before Hiline. Buffi asks that roots are removed from trees, and other lumber has no glass or nails in it. For more details, call Buffi at 208-709-5886.
