Abstract
Skilled contractors are needed to meet the increased demand for wood and to maintain a competitive edge in forestry. The structure of the forest industry has changed significantly. Today’s situation favours smaller contractors that are more flexible. Worldwide contractors are important for forest operations, but there is often limited knowledge about how well they fulfil demands about resource efficiency, social responsibility and environmental protection. The aim of this paper is to present the guidelines for the assessment of forestry contractors following sustainability principles and to present a recently developed system. In addition to the requirements for professional competences and legislative obligations, the system proposes a number of additional requirements such as corporate social responsibility, participation in the local community and greater environmental responsibility. The forestry contractor and the certification body sign a cooperation agreement to obtain the expert assessment. The expert assessment is performed by an evaluator authorised by a certification body. A web service has been introduced with the purpose of serving as a communication tool between professional evaluators and forestry contractors, as well as providing a new possibility for forest owners to get direct contact with forestry contractors. The system enables its users to exert influence on the assessment of forestry contractors by assessing the quality of their services. Private forests would greatly benefit from customer feedback information on the service quality. By now, 1584 forest contractors have registered in Slovenia, where 67% provide the service of cutting and skidding, 8% provide woodchipper service, 7% transport of round wood, 5% cable crane yarding and 4% fully mechanised harvesting. Until June 2020, 142 forest contractors have gone through the process of quality assessment.
Highlights
Existing European Union policies promote the use of wood as a renewable resource and, as a result, we are witnessing a growing demand in the raw materials industry (Spinelli et al 2017)
Croat. j. for. eng. 42(2021)1 ture of forestry contractors changed in the period from the 1960s to the 1990s from independent forest contractors to forest companies that owned their own machinery and had directly employed forest workers, to forest workers who were employed by forest companies but had their own machines, and to forest contractors who were totally independent (Eriksson 2016)
Automatic evaluation of forestry contractors was created according to the traffic light principle using several databases, which mainly correspond to the legal status of the forestry contractor, e.g. data on economic activity are collected from the Agency of the Republic of Slovenia for Public Legal Records and Related Services (AJPES), data on tax payments are collected from the Financial Administration of the Republic of Slovenia (FURS) and data on compliance with regulations on minimal professional competences and health and safety at work are collected from the Inspectorate of the Republic of Slovenia for Agriculture, Forestry, Hunting and Fishing (IKGLR)
Summary
Existing European Union policies promote the use of wood as a renewable resource and, as a result, we are witnessing a growing demand in the raw materials industry (Spinelli et al 2017). The forestry sector has undergone several major changes with respect to the business models of large forestry enterprises over the past decades (Drolet and LeBel 2010, Eriksson 2016, Eriksson et al 2015 Spinelli et al 2017, Šporčić et al 2017). While in the past most of the developmental stages in the forestry industry were induced by technological and industrial development, the majority of recent changes appear to be associated with organizational structure. In 2009, there were 2219 logging contractors in Sweden, and they employed 6337 workers. The majority of harvesting is done by forest contractors with one or two groups of harvester and forwarder with up to 9 employees (Erlandsson 2016). Forest companies gain flexibility to balance in the sense of being able to rapidly
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