Economic methods for the utilisation of logging residues

There are several ways of using logging residues, and the two most common ones in the State Forests are wood chip production for energy purposes by mobile machinery and crushing by tractor-powered crushers. In this research, an economy-based approach was used to compare these methods and assess whether chip production is superior to crushing for clearing a felling area. The average revenues from the sale of wood biomass in the form of wood chips and the average costs of crushing in the Pomorze Forest District were analysed for the period from January 2012 until June 2014. Both revenues and costs (such as fuel, operator’s wage, piling costs, depreciation, insurance and garaging costs) were extracted from the State Forests’ database using data-mining software