The choice of optimal technology for extracting wood greenery from forest dendromass

Abstract

Forests and forest land in Bosnia and Herzegovina encompass an area of 3,231,500 ha out of which 1.28 mill. ha is in the Republika Srpska (RS) entity and the rest in the B&H Federation entity. In the forests of RS each year are cut down around 2.94 mill. m3 of dendromass. Of these, about 15-20% or 127,500 to 170,000 m3 makes wood greenery - twigs with needles or leaves, with 10 mm diameter at thick end, measured with bark. Based on the experience of others, first of all from Russia, the Baltic and Scandinavian countries, it is known that wood greenery represents valued raw material in different sectors of economy: agriculture, pharmaceutical and cosmetics industry and others. The entire annual attack of wood greenery remains unused, with us. There are at least two reasons for this: a) because there are still no elaborated and proven practices of rational collection and concentration of raw materials to processing plants; and b) because we are not familiar enough with the methods of wood greenery processing. A detailed analysis of the technology of wood assortment production in our forestry practice has been carried out. Based on these findings, a model of integrated forest utilization was conceived, including wood greenery. Then, the technology of wood greenery processing were analyzed in the following sense: mechanical drying and fractionation processes, chemical extraction processes, thermal processes by classical heating and energy use of the microwave electromagnetic field and their combinations: mechanical-chemical methods and thermo-chemical methods. Finally, such technology of wood greenery processing has been selected to optimally matches with the integrated use of forest resources, in terms of the following criteria: minimal negative environmental impact, maximum safety at work, low energy consumption, primarily from renewable sources, maximum quality of final products.