ROKWOOD FIRST REVIEW MEETING

The first Review Meeting of the ROKWOOD project (European Regions Fostering Innovation for Sustainable Production and Efficient Use of Woody Biomass) took place last June 25th – 27th, 2013 at Elisefarm, Skåne, Sweden. All project partners representing the six clusters under study (UK, Ireland, Spain, Sweden, Poland and Germany) attended the meeting.

This meeting was conceived in order to review the work performed during the first six months of the project (it started last December 1st, 2012) and plan the next steps to be followed in order to guarantee the success of this initiative.

In addition to this work, some site visits were scheduled by the project hosts (the Swedish cluster, leaded by the Technical Research Institute of Sweden (SP). During this trip, different installations and fields were visited in order to have a broad idea of the current situation of SRPs state of development in Sweden.

Thus, the visits consisted on the following:

• Skarhult Castle (Biobaler harvester, storage, combustion of willow bales).
• TågraGård (250 ha willow plantation, direct chip harvesting, drying trials).
• Sövdeborg Castle (combustion of chips).
• Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), Alnarp (field visits focused on the influence of weeds on willow plantation).
• Borgeby Fair.

BIOAZUL, as part of the coordination team, supported the project general coordinator and the meeting hosts in the meeting organization. The event was very successful, as next steps to be followed were clarified and agreed between the coordination team, the work package leaders and the rest of the partners. The next important task to be developed, leaded by BIOAZUL, will be the preparation of a Joint Action Plan, one of the key results of the project. This Plan intends to set up directions for all clusters members in order to create, strengthen and maintain woody biomass production, provision and use chains in their respective regions within a common ROKWOOD framework.