Ball Ground recycling facility nears completion

A new wood-based fuel and landscape material production plant is in the final stages of construction on 36 acres on Ga. 5 in Ball Ground.

Jimmy Bobo and his brother,  David, owners of Ball Ground Recycling, are building the operation, with financing help in the form of $18.1 million of industrial development tax-free bonds issued by the Cherokee County Resource Recovery Development Authority.

Bobo said wet weather has delayed the opening of the retail portion of his operation somewhat, but he already is supplying biofuel and mulch on a wholesale basis. 

“We have about 50 of our own trucks, and lease out others,” Bobo said.

Carolyn Mathews | Ledger-News David Poss, seated, and Jimmy Bobo, examine a computerized overview of their operations at the new Ball Ground Recycling plant facility on Ga. 5 near Ball Ground. The plant makes landscaping materials and biofuels.

Bobo has been in business more than 20 years in the county. He and his brother once did construction work, but they volunteered to clear land for their church and found that they were left with a significant amount of vegetative debris. The brothers had to pay a large amount out of their own pockets to have it disposed of in a construction landfill. Bobo said he then realized that there was a definite business opportunity in taking vegetative debris and making it into mulch and biofuel. 

“Everything we take would otherwise end up in an inert landfill, where things like dirt and sticks and rocks would go,” Bobo said, noting his business was a green one before being green was popular. What his firm doesn’t make into mulch, it makes into biofuel, which is made up of tiny, specially shaped pieces of wood with just the right moisture content.

“The whole operation is carbon-negative,” he said, explaining that the electricity and fuel he uses to manufacture the fuel, along with the fuel itself, does not equal the amount of fuel that would be used if his buyers used coal. 

“Bioenergy demand has grown exponentially,” he said, “Mills use it because it helps them with emissions regulations. I supply 220 loads per day; if I could supply more, they’d take more.”

Nonetheless, Bobo said his plant probably is the second highest electricity-user in the county. 

“We eventually want to generate our own power,” he said.

Special An aerial view of the processing assembly line at Ball Ground recycling shows trommels that spin to separate products. The raw wood is ground into mulches, soil conditioners and biofuel.

“We might go to Savannah to get cypress to make cypress mulch,” Bobo explained.

Supply and delivery trucks are tracked with a global positioning system from the control tower of the recycling facility. Next to the control tower, a huge truck lift hoists tractor trailer trucks to an angle where there contents can be dumped into a mulch assembly line, which sifts and grinds the wood into several specific types of mulch, peat moss, and plant conditioning soil and even organic soil conditioners. 

A trommel, a type of flour sifter turned on its side, shakes excess debris from the mulch. Dirt is blended in with the wood, to provide the correct moisture content. 

The mulch grinder, Bobo estimates, weighs 60,000 to 80,000 pounds, and the base it sits on “weighs as much as a locomotive.”

Some of the raw resources the recycling operation uses must sit for a long time, including a pile of aged, prime bark that Bobo estimated was 15-20 years old. 

The mulch is stored in mounds, and the mounds sometimes release steam, that he said is sometimes mistaken by passers-by to be smoke. 

“The piles steam more on days when there are extreme divergences in temperature,” he said, “especially as winter turns to spring, and fall turns to winter.” 

Bobo is now putting the final touches on a packaging plant for his Wood-Tech operation, in which he uses a robotic arm designed by a Cumming firm, Mesh Engineering and Manufacturing. The robotic arms stacks bags of mulch onto pallets.

“Most of our potential liability was back injuries from workers lifting and stacking the mulch on pallets,” Bobo explained. He said he still uses the same workers, but there jobs duties have been upgraded to assembly line operators. 

Bobo said he’s hoping for a dry spell because moisture content is so important to both the manufacture of his products and to being able to complete the Ball Ground plant. 

He said the busiest time for his operation is from the first 60-degree day in February until the first day in the summer that it gets uncomfortably hot and humid. 

Bobo said he feels honored to have been tapped by the county as an operation that can be funded with tax-free bonds to promote industrial development. He said he believes his operation will pay off in bringing industry and jobs to the county in the future.

“Ball Ground Recycling is one of the largest natural materials recycling operations in the Southeast, producing products ranging from mulch to garden soil amendments, and we are proud it chose Cherokee County to locate and expand its business,” said County Manager Jerry Cooper. “Creating jobs is our No. 1 priority – especially in the current economy, and with an investment of over $20 million and currently at 45 jobs and growing to an estimated 100 jobs, Ball Ground Recycling plays an important role in the recovery of Cherokee County’s economy.”

A 53-acre tract of land Bobo where Bobo’s Ga. 92 Wood-Tech operation has been located was sold to the Development Authority of Cherokee County last year, which plans to use it as an industrial park. Bobo said he currently is moving mulch operations from that site to Ball Ground.