Along with all of the horticultural waste, golf maintenance generates tons of soil waste...literally tons! Every time we do a sod project, a bunker project, do rock removal or basically anything we generate dirt with unwanted material in it. The dirt is full things like rocks, sod, grass clippings etc. Like any other pile of junk, over the years we have just been making the dirt pile larger and larger until we have run out of room. Over the last several years I have just had the dirt pile hauled out as I knew of no way of separating the good stuff from the bad. This year however, I found a system of screening all the rocks, sod scrapes, limbs and other unwanted materials from the good stuff. It's no fancy system, we've all done the same sort of thing at the beach with a sand screener, it's just that this screener is jumbo sized. Here is a short video of the process. The screening machine has a series of openings that get progressively smaller. Anything that doesn't fit between the screen holes is forced out by the high frequency vibration and downward angle of the screens. In this video I screened the dirt down to 1/2 inch sized material. Meaning anything 1/2 inch or smaller made it all the way through the screens to the finished product.
As you can see the process is simple, and surprisingly the resulting material is pretty good quality. Which is great because not only does a golf maintenance operation generate a lot of dirty dirt, we are also needing a lot of clean dirt for all of those same projects. The screened material will be stock piled and the waste generated from the process will be collected and hauled off site. If I had to guess, I'd say we are recycling 90-95% of the
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