Forest- supply chain cooperation for high-end wood products
CoBoFi project promotes the cooperation amongst forests-owning public authorities (mainly Municipalities), entreprises working directly in forest maintenance (e.g. logging), sawmills and carpenters, resellers of wood-based high-end products and private procurement. Their common objective is to experiment an innovative supply chain in the Region to develop a new product, 100% locally sourced, of high interest also for the international market. The management model within CoBOFi demonstrates a positive economic return for each component of the supply chain including the forest owners.
CoBOFI will experiment new mangement models and production technologies starting from a 4ha local forest to produce a preproduction series. This process and product validation will be the basis for a business plan to reach a sustainable market share without requiring high risk investments. The business plan will verify the opportunity for the replication of the model on local/regional forests that will become again source of sustainable economic activities for high value wood products and for the creation of new business opportunities for the enterprises in the supply chain.
Piedmont has a large forestry coverage which is hardly managed by the owners, because of difficult accessibility and poor quality of stands. Furthermore, the exploitation activities result in higher scraps rate than for geographical areas morphologically less challenging (gentler slopes) and with long term management plans. To improve competitiveness is necessary to develop solutions to increase the wood use vs timber logged rate.
Secondly, the forest-to-energy supply chain, the most developed so far, is suffering the consequences of the stop of public incentives and subsidies so that management and logging costs are just about covered, while other timber applications are not competitive enough. The local enterprises in the sector cannot reach the critical mass to afford significant investments and therefore benefit from economies of scale. Furthermore, despite the large forest area, Piedmont Region hosts only a few enterprises able to create a significant number of second/third-tier suppliers.
The project is expected to deliver: forest management interventions that can be replicated anywhere in the Region, a supply chain involving up to 18 enterprises with distributed business risk, and a highly sought, 100% local wood, innovative product for both the internal market and the export.
Product innovation: a product 100% local (Piemonte) wood, low impact glues, engineered to be cost effective, thermally treated to obtain a variety of colours
Supply chain innovation: all players are cooperating so that timber is classified on site in different quality assortments (rather than simply destined to chipping) to be destined to different applications; this stimulates demand and provides an opportunity to the high-value products manufacturers to access local wood, which has an intrinsic perceived value to the local market but also can be a qualifier for the export (made in Italy with italian wood). This value commands a slightly higher price that covers the higher costs of sourcing local wood. This in turn stimulates the economic value of the forests and as a consequence renewed interest and implementation of forests management to increase the yeld of the woods.
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