An advantage of chipping at the landing is that the harvesting/extraction and the chipping operations are not directly interlinked, and can be separated by hours or even months. This allows for a large feedstock to be built up, facilitating the use of high capacity chippers (>100 m3h_1) capable of filling a waiting truck within an acceptable time and thereby eliminating chip storage problems. Chipping material at roadside landing is the most common production method in biomass to energy chains in Europe. It can also involve chipping onto the ground or into containers. For chipping onto the ground, suitable preparation of the landing should be carried out beforehand (i. e., a clean and level site), while chipping into containers requires detailed logistics planning that synchronises container arrivals.

For chipping into waiting trucks, the challenge lies in balancing chipper produc­tivity with truck waiting time. Chip transport trucks have loose volume capacities of 85-120 m3 and should be filled quickly. High performance chippers capable of doing so represent large capital investments that incur expensive waiting time between truck arrivals, while low performance chippers shift the waiting time to the trucks, which can result in queuing at the landing or poor truck utilisation.

Chippers also need to be relocated from site to site. A solution to the challenges of getting this balance right is the use of chipper-trucks, with on board chippers that both chip and transport the material to the plant. The obvious benefit being that they are self-contained and highly mobile, with the drawback being the loss of payload both in terms of mass and volume due the presence of the chipper (Bjorheden 2008).

Recent research findings (Thorsen et al. 2011) show that self-contained chipping trucks perform well, especially in situations where their high mobility can be utilised to the full.

While gains are made in chipper productivity, the extraction of uncomminuted material (FT, tops, branches) is the least robust link in the chain. Efficient extraction of smaller trees or tree sections requires that they are pre-bunched and well presented for grapple-skidding or forwarding. Pre-bunching almost always implies mechanised felling while grapple-skidding results in higher levels of contamination with mineral soil (high ash levels) and forwarding requires that the trees have been laid in the stand and not in the strip row. FT or tree sections need to be compacted on the forwarder loadbed in order to improve the payload and maximize returns on the time cost of driving in and out of the stand.