Before anything can be rebuilt a massive amount of debris has to be removed. Where does it go? The space required to hold it, even temporarily, has to be huge. Once there, will there be an attempt to recycle some of it?
When Hurricane Wilma came through my area, they basically turned all the city and county parks into temporary holding areas. There were huge piles of wood and other debris, and many of the parks were closed long after the rest of the county was up and running, because they were still processing the debris.
I can’t speak to how they dealt with it from there.
Poking around on google, it seems that the answer to this is no. There is too much debris to sort through and many recyclables like paper get too badly damaged from water to be useful.
Again, poking around on google, it seems like most of the debris is ultimately placed in landfills. Depending on the area and their landfill capacity, much of the debris may be shipped some distance before it ends up in a landfill somewhere.
Downed trees and branches will often be mulched. Some of the mulch is used for composting. Some of the mulch is used as a daily cover in landfills. One article said that they were working with local haulers to find beneficial uses for much of it.
A few Youtube videos:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Hurricane+Ian+Debris+cleanup
Perhaps someone can point out the more interesting ones.
From what I can tell (and it’s all anecdotal, having seen some Houston-area cleanup and some post-Katrina cleanup first-hand), a whole lot of it goes to landfills.
Sometimes there are dead wood burn pits scattered around and run by the city; that’s what they did in the Houston area after Hurricane Alicia when I was a kid. You could take your downed branches to one place and they just had a big pit with a fire in it, and they just burned the branches. But building debris was collected and taken to landfills.
Here in Dallas after an intense thunderstorm and a tornado blew through in 2019, the city took a large area that was/is used for construction staging and basically piled up the wood there, and as I understand it, gradually mulched it and used it on city parks and anywhere else that they needed mulch.
The part of the post-Katrina cleanup that I was involved in was the cleaning out and reprovisioning of lightly damaged/undamaged schools post-Katrina. Basically they’d all been sitting for a year without AC, so there was a lot of mold in some of them. They had contracted with some company that employed a bunch of Brazilian immigrants who’d swarm through the school like locusts and take everything that wasn’t nailed down and chuck it straight into a big trash truck headed for the landfill. My job (at that point) was to have gone in beforehand and marked valuable stuff to be left, and to oversee this to make sure that those items didn’t accidentally get thrown away.
There’s not generally a lot of recycling/sustainability concerns post-storm. People want to get back to normal, which means they want the damaged/destroyed stuff GONE as quickly and easily as possible, and don’t really want to have to either sort it themselves or pay someone else to do it. Nor do the cities, counties, or states involved, so into the landfill it goes.
Interesting. I wonder if any attempt is made to identify hazardous materials and isolate them, or if everything is just scooped up and just tossed. I am thinking about household electronics like computers, TVs, printers and such, but also cans of paint/spray paint, pesticides, chlorine and other chemicals that may be in containers not breached by the floodwaters or otherwise damaged. I would think they’d want to exclude these items from entry into the landfill, but in times of crisis they may not be so choosy - as @bump says - just get it all outta here!
The potentially valuable/useful stuff isn’t neatly marked, though. You’d have to pay people to sort through mounds of garbage, literally tons and tons of it, much of it potentially contaminated with mold and who knows what-all else, and then still have to categorize and deal separately with each type of recyclable.
Much faster, more cost effective, and less hazardous, to chuck it all in a landfill and let future generations deal with it.
Debris hauling is the most lucrative and challenging aspect of recovery. Those few folks that can get the COE contracts will make many millions in a year or so. FEMA assigns the job of debris cleanup, for large disasters, to the Corps of Engineers. They have standing contracts with haulers who a) have or can obtain the equipment to collect the debris, and more importantly they have contracts with landfills to properly dispose of the debris. Having insufficient disposal contracts has gotten more that one person sent to jail over the years. The incentives for swearing to the Government that you can properly dispose of the debris vs the difficulty of actually being able to causes corners and laws to be cut. It is very tough. Picking up green waste (ie trees and brush) is the first step since you have to do that to even access the properties, but even then finding a place to dispose of that is hard. There will be millions of cubic feet of just downed trees and brush. It has to be picked up and properly disposed of. Chipping it isn’t always a good idea, mountains of wood chips don’t decay quickly and pollute groundwater. And people will toss out furniture and building debris with the trees, making it hard to get rid of
And of course that is before the furniture, carpets and sheetrock start appearing. But those volumes are relatively small. Disposing of construction and demolition debris is something every community deals with as a normal part of operations. The volumes are higher, but at least people know what to do with it.
Then comes the refrigerators, household chemicals, gasoline, cars, lawnmowers, oil, pesticides, etc. Remember people hoard things. There will be chemicals that have been banned for decades out on the street-or worse.
A very smart and well-prepared community will have established landfills for storm debris years in advance. Very very few communities are that smart and forward thinking.
there are two things that have to be done immediately after the search and rescue-get tarps on roofs and clear the roads. While everyone is wondering where they can sleep and when the power will be back on. 
Okay, I work at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) and have some knowledge in this area.
In Florida, counties, municipalities, state agencies (read DOT), and large companies register areas called Disaster Debris Management Sites (DDMS’s). These site are “pre-authorized” to accept unsorted debris. Operating and closure plans are submitted and reviewed (as well as the site itself). Those pre-auths must be renewed every year.
When a storm happens, the sites in the relevant areas are “activated” via notice to Florida DEP after an emergency final order is posted which includes the area that pre-authorized the site. The sites accept unsorted debris (although generally attempts are made to separate organic and non-organic debris). The organic debris is either recycled (via mulching/grinding) or burned in open-air burn curtain pits. The non-organic is sorted, but only to make sure it goes to a landfill qualified to handle its particular type of debris. Not much, if any, is recycled - too much trouble for too little return. The sites must be emptied and closed within 30 days of the end of the emergency order unless an extending order is authorized. For the record, we still have Michael sites open and that was 4 years ago.
Most contracts for hauling (and in some cases operating the DDMS) are let by the county or municipality (not FEMA and certainly not the USACOE) and there have been many instances of counties outbidding other counties - some of which has been either addressed or attempted to be addressed by state law. FEMA does, however, usually reimburse the county/muni for the expense, which is why a Federal Disaster Declaration is such a big deal since they only pay if the Feds declare it a disaster.
http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&Search_String=&URL=0400-0499/0403/Sections/0403.7071.html
https://floridadep.gov/waste/permitting-compliance-assistance/documents/guidance-establishment-operation-and-closure
I keep forgetting to come back to post this, so I’m glad Zakalwe just posted and bumped the thread.
I follow the Florida Department of Emergency Management on Facebook, and they’ve been posting this image about separating your debris into piles.
https://scontent-mia3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/310546364_484151163758626_223247080477884065_n.jpg?_nc_cat=108&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=730e14&_nc_ohc=NLHmpimTWZQAX8Jbek4&_nc_ht=scontent-mia3-1.xx&oh=00_AT_3OwBCjpJJ94V8u40j1Ou-OoivdNCZrlh6ESa8kkxVRA&oe=63546C59
Thanks!
Florida is better organized than Louisiana. After a bit of investigation I agree that it seems that counties are expected to contract out the debris hauling to be reimbursed by FEMA. I was remembering Katrina. Back then no county in Louisiana was together enough to be able to contract for much of anything. And as I mentioned, the COE contracts in other states, for instance N. Carolina years ago, resulted in people getting into a lot of trouble. So I gather that now the COE is out of the debris hauling business. We still have a couple of millionaires (well their families) living around here from the days of Katrina and COE though.
Well, for a while, we were getting hurricanes pretty damn often. It was a skill learned of necessity.