What if I told you that buying mulch is the same as buying your tin cans back from a recycler
When we go prune trees, we tend to chip up a lot of tree limbs and logs.
After we leave a property we drop those chips off at a recycler. The recycler will combine them with other recycled woods, grind them down to a uniform size, add dyes to darken their color and sell the resulting "processed mulch" back to the same people who paid us to take it from them.