Active Tree Services SA

Across the country we manage vegetation on more than a million spans of powerline, and in South Australia that work is run out of our depot at Edwardstown. Active Tree Services was started by the Willcocks family in 1975 and is still Australian owned, with a workforce of around 1,000 and depots in NSW, the ACT, Queensland, Victoria, Tasmania, the Northern Territory and here in Adelaide.

Utilities are a big part of what we do, cyclic and reactive clearance for the likes of Ausgrid, AusNet and EvoEnergy, and we hold contracts with more than forty councils nationally, including street tree maintenance for the City of Sydney. Alongside that we work on civil, road and rail projects, and on bushfire mitigation programs. Emergency response and insurance work sits in the same division, so when a storm or a fire has been through, the crews and the machinery are already contracted and ready to move.

The arboriculture side covers the whole life of a tree rather than just the end of it. We do tree inspection and assessment, tree pruning and removal, formative pruning on young stock, planting and establishment, watering, decompaction and feeding programs, and veteran and significant tree management where an old tree is worth keeping. Habitat creation, porous paving and water sensitive urban design go in where a council wants the soil and the canopy working together. Everything that comes off a job is chipped and mulched.

Our vegetation management crews handle bushfire mitigation, slashing and land clearing, herbicide application, biosecurity weed identification and integrated pest management, with resident liaison and program planning wrapped around the works. If you need the thinking rather than the chainsaws, our consultancy arm does tree risk assessment, arboricultural impact assessments for development sites, and canopy cover and green space planning.

The gear is where a lot of our safety work has gone. We run Jarraff purpose built tree trimmers in 4WD and tracked configurations, Tigercat mulchers, Magni telescopic handlers, chippers and elevated work platforms, and we were first in the industry to bring in the smaller insulated telescopic EWPs. The idea is simple enough: keep people out of the air and out of storm damaged trees wherever a machine can do the job instead. We are also independently endorsed as a carbon neutral business, with Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions assessed and offsets including native reforestation in the Yarra Yarra biodiversity corridor.

From Edwardstown we cover Adelaide and South Australia, and our other depots run out of Morisset, Waterloo, Ingleside, Queanbeyan, Bald Hills, Bayswater, Bridgewater and Brinkin. Whether it is a utility corridor, a council contract, a school or a sports club, ring the South Australian office and we will come and look at the site.