I live in a neighborhood that employs a landscape company to maintain the common areas. They put down that reddish colored mulch under the bushes. Whenever it rains lightly I notice it smells like a forest fire. Is it possible that companies are making mulch from burned trees? Maybe that is why they dye it red?
Maybe it’s from trees salvaged after a burn.
But some mulch stinks badly for other reasons, like being stored or bagged when wet.
The dye is for “aesthetic” reasons. There are people who just can’t accept brown mulch.
I would imagine the mulch is dyed red to make it uniform, allowing bark from God-knows-what to be all dumped together.
Red gives the impression the bark is from redwoods and/or cedar, wood that is resistant to rot and insects.
The red dye is probably leftover food dye that Food and Drug says people shouldn’t consume.
~VOW
Hmm, it seems that some dyed mulch does come from construction and demolition (C&D) waste, which can be problematic.
“…it has been found that some of the recycled waste wood used for making landscape mulch products is contaminated with various chemicals, such as creosote and CCA (chromated copper arsenate). CCA, of course, is the chemical that was used in the manufacture of pressure-treated wood. With bans on arsenic-based wood preservatives in recent years, this may become less of a problem, though there is still plenty of CCA preserved wood to be found in older decks and fences. Sometimes wood pallets that have been used in the transport of chemical agents can become contaminated by spills of these chemicals. The bottom line is that CCA and other toxic chemicals have been found to be contaminating soil where colored wood chip mulch has been applied. The most egregious source of the contamination appears to CCA treated wood recycled from C&D waste.”
I avoid colored mulches even though the dyes are said to be non-toxic. It’s nuts in my opinion to use black mulch in hot summer areas, defeating one purpose of mulch - to keep the soil cool.