A remote-controlled dozer not much bigger than a common lawn tractor designed to remove woody debris from small acreages.

Thin strips of waste wood tied up in bales that can replace the straw commonly used to control erosion on everything from charred forests to restored mine sites.

Portable bins that can be dropped in difficult-to-reach logging sites and filled with timber slash or chips that might later be ground into pellets for wood stoves or used to heat a school.

These were just some of the innovations that 85 men and women learned about on Monday at the New and Innovative Forestry Equipment Show and Workshop at the U.S Forest Service's Missoula Technology Development Center. The event was sponsored by the Forest Service and Montana Community Development Corp.

Much of the work in the woods these days is focused on fuel reduction and forest health, which means there are lots of small trees, branches and piles of bark in need of disposal.

At one time, all that material was considered waste - and so was piled and burned.

Those days are gone.

There's a growing market for all of that material, with new ideas cropping up all the time. The challenge facing the timber industry is finding cost-effective ways to get all of that stuff out of the woods and to the marketplace.

“We're all focused on fuel reduction work and there's lots of this kind of material out there,” said Bob Rummer, the Forest Service's project leader of forest operations research. “The largest problem we face is how to make it cost effective. The American public doesn't have enough money to treat all of those acres. We have to find ways to pay for it.

“All of these people are looking for new ways to do that. This is all cutting-edge stuff.”

A good example is Craig Thomas' successful experiment with roll-off containers and log bunks now being used to transport small-diameter wood and slash to markets.

Accessibility to a worksite often can be a problem, Rummer said. Some places are too tight or the road too windy for the big chip trucks to maneuver.

“People might want to produce chips from that material, but there's no way to get it out of the woods,” he said.

Thomas, a Missoula-area forester, designed the smaller containers that can be dropped off at the site. The containers can either be filled with chipped material or be used to transfer unprocessed slash to a centralized location where a chipper is stationed.

“It makes for a very flexible system that makes it possible to add some value to what used to be considered waste,” Rummer said.

Rummer and Craig Rawlings of the Montana Community Development Corp. thought they might attract a handful of folks when they began putting together this week's event.

“Instead of just one technology and maybe 10 people, we ended up with 13 different technologies and 85 people,” Rawlings said. “There's a lot of interest out there right now surrounding the handling of woody biomass.”

And it might just be the tip of the iceberg as the United States starts looking for alternatives to fossil fuel.

“The whole bioenergy thing is really starting to heat up right now,” Rawlings said. “As long as oil prices stay up, everyone is looking for alternatives.”

While the focus for alternative fuel may be on corn right now, it may not be long until trees and other plants are being used to power this country's fleet of automobiles.

“We think there's going to be quite a bit of money in the next energy bill and farm bill for the development of cellulosic ethanol,” Rawlings said. “There are a lot of people looking at it right now.”