How Wood Chippers Can Be Used For Sustainable Forestry
Using outdoor environments to create resources can be a wonderful and sustainable way to improve our modern world. To be truly sustainable, it’s important to utilise every element of nature that we choose to use. Luckily, wood chippers can help us to do so with ease.
Read on to find out the importance of sustainability, in addition to the benefits of using wood chippers.
Why Sustainable Forestry Is Important
It can be easy to believe forestry is inherently a sustainable resource, easily continued with no adjustments needed. Unfortunately, this is not the case. To get the most out of our forest and wood as a resource, it’s vitally important to acknowledge that sustainability is important when it comes to forestry and make changes accordingly.
The Ways Trees Are Beneficial
With modern advancements and population growth, it’s becoming worryingly easy to imagine a landscape without trees. Trees are, however, incredibly necessary and beneficial to our environment. When we use wood, therefore, it’s important to make the effort not to overexploit our local forests.
Trees are beneficial in the following ways:
- Support livelihoods
- Carbon storage
- Flood risk mitigation
- Help our ecosystems thrive
- Retain biodiversity
- Provide habitats for wildlife
How Wood Chippers Can Help
When it comes to making forestry more sustainable, wood chippers are fantastic tools to do so. They help to use all the material that comes from log splitting, without leaving unsightly and unusable waste behind. Chopping wood quickly, wood chippers complete the job fast with no excess energy usage, helping to save both our money and our environment.
Wood chips that are produced by wood chippers can be made into mulch, greatly benefiting the agriculture industry. Likewise, both the construction and landscaping industries have uses for wood chipping, which means an eco-friendly resource can be used productively. To find out more about how you can recycle, reuse and repurpose the produced wood chips, read on.
The Uses of Wood Chips
What happens to those little leftover parts of a felled tree that don’t quite qualify as firewood? Luckily, there are several uses for wood chips to make them beneficial and sustainably used in our modern world.
With their uniquely wonderful smell, wood chips are fantastic for a myriad of purposes, so don’t let these leftover parts go to waste. Learn about some potential uses for your wood chips below.
Composting
Rotting wood has lots of nutrients within it, making it fantastic for turning into compost ready for use to help grow new plants. As a carbon-rich material, wood chips can nurture the growth of many different plants. The nutrients found inside wood chips are great for creating new life steadily.
The smaller the chips the easier they will break down, which is why using a wood chipper specifically for leftover parts is especially important. The quicker your wood chips break down the sooner your new healthy and nutrient-filled compost can be used in your garden. The wood itself also retains water within, which is slowly released into the surrounding soil, helping to keep the ground beneficially wet for the nourishment of plants.
Making Wildlife-Friendly Habitats
How can we help our children learn about the environment around them, as well as how to care for it? Bug hotels and other wildlife habits are a fantastic way to do so. Creating safe sanctuaries where insects, frogs and other small creatures can hide away helps to teach children why it’s important to look after the world around them.
Wood chips are a wonderful way to form visible security for local creatures. Piles of wood chips, where bugs can be buried away from the rain, give a natural source of shelter. Plus, getting your children involved with creating these safe spaces can be a fun hands-on activity, particularly during warm school holidays.
Covering Playground Floors
Few things are more unsightly than the brightly coloured tarmac that covers playgrounds. These playgrounds are usually paired with metal play equipment that burns small and sensitive hands during the summer months.
To create a space with children in mind, wood chips are a great surface for more natural playgrounds. Wood chips help children become accustomed to the nature around them, with the added benefit of being far less of an eyesore. Combined with natural and local wooden play equipment, playgrounds can be better geared safely towards a child’s development.
Creating Paths
For a truly natural garden, planting a variety of local flowers can do wonders. It creates a country-style home no matter where you might be based. To get through these flowers without harming them, however, it’s important to make a designated path. For the most natural appearance, opt for wood chips to create pathways through.
Besides domestic path purposes, parks and woodlands can also benefit from natural wood chip paths. Gravel can be an intrusive option for paths, distracting from the lush greens and browns of a woodland. Muddy paths are a further nuisance, creating an uncomfortable mess and can often be dangerous to fall in, with many wellington boots lost along the way. Wood chips are therefore a great way to retain the natural beauty of a forest while ensuring it is easily accessible for any visitors.
Growing Mushrooms
Whimsical and friendly, mushrooms are a great sign of a healthy garden or woodland environment. To help them grow, choose wood chips as a replacement for soil. When kept moist, an area covered with wood chips can encourage and sustain the growth of mushrooms. Choose shady environments in areas where other plants might suffer to make the most of any outdoor space.
Other Benefits of Wood Chippers
While this article focuses largely on the eco-friendly advantages of wood chippers, its other benefits should not be overlooked in their importance. In this section, we will cover some of the ways a wood chipper can help you.
Profitable
As seen in the previous section of this article, wood chips are useful for several purposes. If you have more wood chips than you can use, you might consider selling your surplus wood chips. Many people specifically go out of their way to purchase wood chips for use in their gardens or other environments. By investing in a wood chipper, you open up a whole new market to sell to.
Cost-Effective
Wood chippers are cost-effective machines, helping to save money. Through sales of wood chips, you may even earn back your investment into the equipment itself. They efficiently and quickly get the wood out of your way when completing a project. You can also save money by purchasing rather than renting, especially if you regularly need to utilise the equipment. In some cases, you can even save on labour costs.
Fuss-Free
Wasting large amounts of wood can be a nuisance, particularly when it comes to log-splitting tasks. It may result in several trips to a waste centre, taking precious time away from really getting the job done. Even getting the wasted wood into an area can be a task in itself, whereas wood chips are easily sorted and disposed of.
By using a wood chipper, the waste can be neatly stored. Wood chips are small, allowing any bag they might be stored within to move and shift easily as needed. Large and sharp wasted wood, on the other hand, can be difficult to wield and transport.
Our Range
To help you find the right wood chipper for your needs, our team at Rock Machinery is readily available to help. We have a range of wood chippers available for delivery, great for a whole manner of wood chipper needs.
Our mini chippers are fantastic for domestic uses when disposing of your leftover wood seems like a challenge. These can be wheeled around on their own, or otherwise attached to your ATV equipment for extra ease of use.
For heavy-duty and commercial chipping projects, we have a range of equipment that can be mounted on the back of a tractor. Some of our available wood chippers have steel blades which allow for precision cutting, in addition to self-feed hoppers for extra efficiency.
For other wood-cutting needs, we have a range of electric and petrol log splitters, as well as saw benches, which help you achieve the perfect cut every time. In addition, we can help optimise your gardening experience by providing sprayers, which can project any liquid you choose to put inside.
How We Can Help
At Rock Machinery, we take pride in supplying our customers with high-quality equipment that meets their needs with ease. Visit our website to view our range of products, or get in touch today to find out more about how we can help you.