Empirical Insights into Salvage Wood Logistics

Abstract

Climate crises and natural disasters increasingly challenge wood supply chains by the critical need to transport high volumes of salvage wood quickly out of the forests to limit wood value loss and to prevent inducing forest calamities. Salvage wood logistics covering unimodal, multimodal and multi-echelon unimodal transport as well as storage plays an essential role in tackling existing problems and future risks by linking diverse actors along wood supply chains. Since little is known about specific challenges in salvage wood logistics, an extensive empirical study was conducted to evaluate logistics concepts and coping strategies involving stakeholders representing the entire wood value chain in Austria. The knowledge and experience of 161 forest owners, transport operators and wood-based industry actors were surveyed based on questionnaires with 108 matrix, rating, Likert scale and open questions. Results show a significant loss in salvage wood transport capacity due to long waiting times at receiving mills leading to more than one-fourth lost transport capacity in the unimodal salvage wood supply chain. Sustainable and resilient wood supply chain management can be achieved by increasing train and semitrailer truck wood transport as well as wood storage capacity and by improving both working conditions for self-loading log-truck drivers and cooperation between stakeholders.