Collecting from the woods?

[Venom1080]

Odd and sad. In the forest industries, bark is considered a nuisance, something to fuel power plants with providing it is easily hauled. Otherwise is slash and burn on the (former) forest floors or burn piles at the lumber mills.

If the trees are gone, why does what they do with the bark matter?

 

[The Snark]

If the trees are gone, why does what they do with the bark matter?

That is a loaded question that would take hundreds of pages of text to answer. Suffice, when the forest industry is granted a timber harvest plan on public land, national forest, they have certain obligations that must be met depending on given environments. Burning off the slash and bark is one, erosion prevention measures, tree replanting, defoliant spraying and the list goes on.
To put it simplistically, the environment gets trashed in an approved politically correct manner, the lumber companies scamper off with the profits, the public is left with denuded devastated land and watershed restoration bills, and the land itself is often replanted with quick $$$ quick growing pulp pine trees that irreversibly damage the soil so only pines will grow there ever after.
Don't take my word for this. Get your hands on BLM maps and check out that vast tracts of land labeled Destroyed Watershed.
I think they have some new euphemisms for Destroyed Watershed now. Restorable/Reclaimable Forest Land or similar.

Anyway, limbs and tree tops are 'slash', burned on sight. Bark is torn off with a debarker, ground up, blown into chip trucks and dumped into power plants. It's lousy for BTUs but is otherwise considered industrial waste.