City-parish efforts to sweep East Baton Rouge Parish clean of debris is a monumental undertaking allowing power plant workers to turn wood into bio-fuel.Hurricane Gustav’s path across Louisiana left behind more than 1 million cubic yards of debris in EBR Parish, and as of Monday, city-parish totals confirmed the removal of more than 991,000 cubic yards of debris.”If you take a football field and put an 18-foot wall around it … what we pick up in one day would fill that area — and that’s compacted vegetation,” said Peter Newkirk, EBR Parish Department of Public Works director.That’s 30,000 cubic yards of compressed plant mulch produced daily. The total EBR Parish cleanup process has a $20 million price tag. Wood debris removal began Sept. 7, when the city signed a $10 million contract with Ceres Environmental headquartered in Minnesota.Now a major player in the city’s cleanup, Ceres leads the coordination efforts for hundreds of trucks from across the country to help collect debris.The city-parish also teamed with two local companies — Natural Resource Recovery Inc. and the Shaw Group Inc. — to facilitate the clean-up. NRRI heads the recycling process, and Shaw monitors how much debris the trucks pick up.The agreement calls for an eco-friendly overhaul of all debris in the parish within 30 days — a viable timeline if trucks continue at their current pace, Newkirk said.”On a given day, there are approximately 400 trucks on the road,” said Sid Brian, NRRI president.Each truck scours the city for wood waste on the street — waste that will eventually become bio-fuel, landscape mulch or lumber.”Almost every ounce of vegetative matter will be beneficially re-used and recycled,” Brian said.Most mulch will be sold as an alternative fuel product to power manufacturing plants with cheaper, cleaner fuel.”It will mostly be sold to paper mills and saw mills in the area and in Arkansas and Mississippi,” Brian said.Because fuel prices are more expensive in the North, Newkirk said several types of industrial plants also prefer mulch burning to regular gas.Chris Dixon, recycling division operations manager for Ring Power Corp., said the “green wave” has taken off along the Southeast coast in the past four years.”What’s driving it now is the price of regular fuel,” he said.Most wood along the Southeast coast can be easily converted into bio-fuel because of high British thermal unit values, Dixon said. When burned, these high-btu fuels radiate abundant amounts of heat energy to power plants and offset energy costs.But accomplishing this energy-saving task requires cooperation from the residents who throw their debris to the curb. Wood waste is only phase one of the three-part operation. Hauling off synthetic debris will begin once all wood is cleared, followed by a final phase, during which workers double-check for missed debris.The city’s contract pays Ceres $7.50 per cubic yard of debris collection. But before Hurricane Ike pounded the Gulf Coast, Newkirk said the city amended the contract as an incentive to speed up the process and agreed to pay Ceres $11.39 per cubic yard after more than 25,000 cubic yards were collected. The figures reverted back to $7.50 after five days.A separate agreement earns Shaw $1.50 per cubic yard for debris monitoring, and NRRI about $5 per cubic yard. Newkirk said he expects FEMA to reimburse the city for all payments if procedures are followed properly, though federal law guarantees only 75 percent reimbursement.The city obtained permits for eight landfill sites in the parish that serve as debris dumping grounds. Because the wood waste is still fresh and moist, these massive deposits don’t pose a high fire hazard threat, said Blake Brian, NRRI employee.—-Contact the news staff at [email protected]