Timber industry: the Swiss forest out of the game?
1997
Sandoz, J.L. (ETH-Zentrum, Zuerich (Switzerland). Departement des sciences forestieres, chaire de sylviculture)
The use of forest resources feeds an industry that is organised into several sectors of timber transformation and valorisation. This article presents a historical, technical, and financial analysis of the timber industry in Europe and attempts to find an explanation of the present difficulties regarding the exploitation of Swiss forests. It then shows that a better valorisation of massive products produced from the Swiss forests is absolutely necessary; otherwise Switzerland might be left behind in the timber industry. With respect to the price of softwood, this article shows the great advantage of Scandinavia, where resources in the forest industry are half the cost of those in mountain forests in Austria and Switzerland for instance. Moreover, with the constant decrease of the price of raw materials over the past 30 years, and particularly of timber (reduction factor 6), industrialisation has focussed on mass products, such as paper and panels, to the prejudice of massive timber. This has led to delocalisations to forest areas, where resources are cheap, and thus Switzerland has been excluded. In an effort to stop this course of events, this article proposes a method to grade softwood directly in the forest. This operation can be performed using Sylvatest, an apparatus based on ultrasound measurements. This new technology allows Swiss timber to be graded and shows that much of it is of very good quality and can thus be used for construction where competition is less intense
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