Exploitation of tree pruning residues and their optimal allocation in the particle board industry

In recent years, the general policy of the country has been based on the decision to stop the exploitation of wood from the north industrial forests. While the population is increasing, the demand for wood is increasing. Therefore, it’s necessary to find alternative sources to supply raw materials for the wood industry. In Iran, every year, a lot of wood waste is burned and wasted due to a lack of development and promotion of appropriate exploitation methods. In present study has been investigated the exploitation and optimal allocation of wood residues from pruning apple trees as raw material for the particleboard industry. Exploitation was carried out in apple orchards of Damavand city with a chipper and transported to factories by truck. Evaluations of the work process and the productivity and cost have been done with continuous timing method and optimal allocation have been made with the linear programming model by transportation method and simplex algorithm. The results showed that the longest recovery time of residues is related to the collection and transfer to the depot and chipping them, respectively and the production of residues is 1.97 tons per hectare and the production of chips is 0.160 tons per hour. Also, the optimal allocation of 400,000 tons of resources from the exploitation of pruning residues of apple trees with a minimum cost of transportation (950 billion rials), while solving the problem of waste disposal and reducing environmental pollution will bring an annual profit of about 450 billion rials for the country and will be compensated part of the shortage of raw materials for the particleboard industry.