The Regional Electricity and Generation/Supply companies have a constant battle to remove trees and vegetation from their installations. If trees touch the overhead lines it can cause an "outage" whereby no electricity can be supplied. The resulting loss of revenue is tremendous and the Health and Safety implications are horrific. Weather conditions also have to be taken into account when "Line work" is considered, not only do trees grow upwards, but in the summer the lines expand and drop into the trees, in the winter the overheads can be weighed down by frost or snow.
The Rail Authorities have a large programme of "De-Veg" work, cutting back trees on embankments and cuttings for a number of reasons. The implications of a crash due to fallen timber or an unsighted signal do not bear consideration. A fair amount of de-veg work also takes place for the renewal of their boundary fencing. The maintenance of other railway property has also to be taken into consideration.
The major road network of the UK is patrolled for potentially dangerous trees or situations where correct management is required. All new roads are planted with trees and shrubs as part of a landscape project. Trees grow big! Our chippers chop the problem down to size.
Local Government have a huge responsibility to maintain their property including any trees and grounds maintenance or Landscape works. Some have their own in-house or DLO organisation, others sub-contract out the work to a variety of national or local contractors.
MOD establishments or Crown Property is also duty-bound to maintain their habitats. Some work is sub-contracted out to national or local contractors. But we have even sold wood chippers to the Bomb Disposal people!
New build projects, refurbishment, or routine maintenance of housing estates, both public and private. Agricultural estate management. Supermarket or Retail Shopping Centres. Business Parks.
Machine shave been sold to Area Health Authorities, Prisons, Schools and Colleges for maintenance work as well as Arboricultural colleges as part of their teaching remit.
Golf Clubs, Amusement Parks, Zoo and Wildlife parks, Hotels, Stately homes and parks and gardens have also featured on our database as users of wood chippers, shredders or stump grinders.
There are charity groups that specialise in "re-skilling" the long-term unemployed in land-based skills including landscape works, or for the re-habilitation of offenders to "change their direction in life".
This market can have many forms, Farmers looking to diversify, shredding, chipping or composting material. People obtaining grant money to enable them to breakdown pallets on industrial sites. Local composting groups and recycling projects. Biomass wood fuels, animal bedding or wood chips to mulch are only a few.
Small-scale forestry projects can be a market for our wood chippers. They could be used in "ride" establishment, coppice sites, initial thinnings or crown lift work. Tracked machines have been utilised on sapling clearfell sites for birds nesting sites.
Wood chippers have been used with regeneration work, getting rid of non-natural species of shrubs, undergrowth or trees. On some sites where the likes of Rhododendron have been allowed to grow wild, wood chippers have been used and the stumps then destroyed to prevent re-growth. Our machine have been used in reclamation work on SSSI projects.
The greater majority of tree surgery falls into this category; the "Conifer problem" is bread and butter to the majority of Arborists. Big trees in built up areas require an awful lot of monitoring and care. The tree surgery people who do this work are a major part of our market.
A great deal of independent tool and plant hire outlets would like to have smaller machines or indeed specialist machines to run on their plant hire register. This is to service all the above market sectors.
It is the EU's declared objective to be re-cycling up to 75% of all green/organic waste by the year 2005, the EU and National Governments are creating legislation and taxes to achieve their objective by such means as Landfill Tax (the UK tax is only about 30% of the equivalent tax in Germany, we can be assured the UK tax will increase over the next few years).
