Herefordshire firewood company Certainly Wood has launched a new £400K firewood processing line - one of the largest of its kind in the world. The project was part funded by the Rural Development Programme for England under the Countryside Productivity Forestry Grant scheme.

The development is part of Certainly Wood's ongoing commitment to sustainable methods, as it gives the business the means to deal with woodland thinnings of all sizes.

The new processor was manufactured by Italian firm Pinosa and runs alongside Certainly Wood's existing Pinosa machine. Not only can it handle trees of up to 780mm in diameter, it also dramatically increases output with up to 100 tonnes produced each day.

Working alongside the manufacturer, Certainly Wood has also developed a unique grading system which sorts out the larger logs having been initially split and sends them to another machine to split them again - once a time-consuming process done by hand.

The logs then pass over a final cleaning system to remove any smaller pieces of wood that don't make the grade - any waste product goes off to the boiler to be fed into the kilns. The final quality product is sent directly to an automatic bin filling system. This will enable the business to achieve its target output of 20,000 tonnes per annum of British kiln dried logs and circa 2,000 tonnes of poplar kindling. With its popular Flamers also in demand, Certainly Wood has increased production to 10million of these wood wool and wax natural firelighters on its site too.

Certainly Wood has always adhered to a policy of only using timber that comes from within a 100 mile radius of its farm. This ensures that all its logs and kindling are 100% British so that it can be certain of the quality and provenance - British woodland is controlled by felling licenses to ensure the country's trees are well managed and never face depletion.

Commenting on the machine, officially named Processo thanks to a competition run with a local forest school, Madley Primary, Certainly Wood's Nic Snell said:

‘We're constantly looking at new ways to be mindful about the planet - the kilns we use to dry our logs are primarily fired by our own wood waste whilst much of our electricity comes from our solar panels.

We have seen a significant rise in the cost of raw materials over the last 12 months, which has not only increased firewood costs, but also that of drying it too. This new investment will help to offset some of these increases and keep costs of processing to a minimum.

In 2019, we've changed our packaging so that our bags are 100% recyclable and are made using 30% recycled materials. Our logs also adhere to the Ready to Burn standard meaning they contain under 20% moisture ensuring they burn longer and hotter creating a cleaner burn to ensure optimum efficiency and minimal particulate emissions.

We send out postage-paid bags with all the bulk bags we sell, allowing customers to return them free of charge via Collect Plus so they can be re-used.".

To see Processo in action, why not visit  https://youtu.be/sockjjIwE4g