Harvesting, infrastructure, logistics

The ashes can be used in a road building among gravel. The use of ash from neighboring heat plants reduces the use of natural aggregates. The use of ash in the construction of the road has been limited, as it is currently subject to environmental permits.
In the forest and energy industries, burning wood produces a lot of ash, which is placed in landfills. The forest industry alone generates more than 300 000 tonnes of exploeable ash every year. The increase in wood energy increases the amount of ash even further. Current measures to benefit from the use of ash do not correspond to the principles of sustainable consumption and production. It would be essential to influence the legislation in order to ease the utilization of ash. It is important to perform carrying capacity measurements and research and test different mixtures of gravel and ash. The environmental issues need to be surveyed.

In Finland there are 135 000 km of forest roads where maintenance is necessary for wood procurement. According to the National Forest Programme 2015, forest car roads should be upgraded to 4 000 km annually. In the construction of roads, cost-effectiveness is most essential. The biggest challenge in most cases is the availability of affordable gravel or crushing near the forest road project. Utilization of ash as material for road construction and maintenance has produced excellent results in terms of both the technical suitability and the environmental impact.

Public administrations directly manage a road network on forest land that in many cases is longer than the general road network itself.
Wood transport is a key factor in the value chain of wood mobilization.
There is therefore a need for reliable knowledge of this network, so that resources can be optimised and rationalised in terms of maintenance and improvement, that is to say, the rationalisation of the processes of inventory, planning, programming and control of the work on these tracks must be emphasised.

The lack of digital cartography with sufficient quality in rural areas is a constant in most territories. Together with a certain delay in the application of technologies in the sectors that operate in this area, they make these areas a priority objective on which to concentrate this type of effort.
This cartography allows to plan more effectively the operations related to the harvesting and transport of wood, from the forest to the industry.

Since 2009, Cesefor has directed and developed the project co-financed by the Regional Government of Castilla y León and the Ministry of Industry and Trade.
Within the framework of this project, more than 50,000 km of rural roads have been inventoried and more than 33,000 equipments have been collected, forming a continuous network connected to the road network with extensive qualitative information on forest areas.
The information has been collected by GPS, attaching the necessary qualitative information in each case.
Specific cartography has been distributed to environmental agents, fire extinguishing media dependent on the Junta de Castilla y León and the digital information is available at the Junta de Castilla y León.
A specific navigator has also been developed for rural roads, since due to the special characteristics of this network it is necessary to know the existing restrictions, either by type of vehicle or state of the tracks.