Active Tree Services SA

Purpose built machinery is how we keep our people out of the air. Our Jarraff tree trimmers come in 4WD and tracked configurations and put the operator in a climate controlled, ROPS/FOPS accredited cabin instead of up a tree weakened by age, storm, fire or flood, and our elevated work platforms come in a range of boom lengths with insulation certification for work on powerlines. Active Tree Services was the first in the industry to bring in the smaller telescopic insulated EWPs, and our own research and development facility has produced safety innovations that clients have since taken up themselves. The South Australian arm of all this runs out of the Edwardstown depot.

That fleet exists because of the scale of the work behind it. We manage vegetation across more than a million spans of powerline nationally for utilities including Ausgrid, AusNet and EvoEnergy, and we hold vegetation management contracts with over forty councils, among them the street tree maintenance for the City of Sydney. Civil, road and rail projects sit alongside that, as do bushfire mitigation programs, and because emergency response and insurance work is one of our own divisions, the crews and the machinery are already under contract by the time a storm or a fire has been through.

The arboriculture side takes in the whole life of a tree. We handle tree inspection and assessment, tree pruning and removal, formative pruning on young stock, planting and establishment, watering, decompaction and feeding programs, urban forestry, and veteran and significant tree management where an old tree is worth keeping in place. Habitat creation, porous paving and water sensitive urban design go in where the soil and the canopy have to work together, and everything that comes off a job is chipped and mulched. Our consultancy arm writes tree risk assessments, arboricultural impact assessments for development sites, tree management plans and tree protection, provides project arborist services, and does flora and fauna work, soil assessment and improvement plans, and canopy cover and green space planning.

The Willcocks family started this business in 1975 and it remains Australian owned, with around 1,000 people and depots in New South Wales, the ACT, Queensland, Victoria, Tasmania, the Northern Territory and here in South Australia. We hold independent endorsement as a carbon neutral business, with Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions assessed and forecast and offsets procured, including Australian native reforestation in the Yarra Yarra biodiversity corridor. Our Act Green team works on fuel reduction, reuse and recycling, and puts mulch back into the communities the crews work in.

From Edwardstown we cover Adelaide and the rest of South Australia, and the enquiries reach us from power utilities, councils, civil contractors, asset management groups, schools, universities, community organisations and sports clubs. Vegetation management here runs to bushfire mitigation, slashing and land clearing, herbicide application, biosecurity weed identification, integrated pest management, root pruning and root barrier installation for pipe laying, and rock removal and bank stabilisation, with resident liaison and program planning wrapped around the works. Ring the South Australian office and we will come out and look at the site.