What is one tonne of carbon dioxide
by Chris Tilley
I was recently asked what one tonne of carbon dioxide was equivalent too. My first though was how many trees. One mature tree absorbs 48 lbs of carbon dioxide per year. It stores the carbon and releases the oxygen that we all breathe.(source) A tree does this through photosynthesis basically sun, carbon dioxide and water go in and produces water, oxygen and sugar. The sugar contains the carbon and is what the tree uses to grow. (source) Using the 48 lbs per tree we would need 46 trees to offset one tonne of carbon.
Going back to the plastic bags article one persons yearly plastic bags causes 30.5 lbs of carbon dioxide. That would take one tree almost 8 months to absorb. For the 1,000,000 people it would take 636,226 trees a year to absorb.
Another way to look at carbon is offsetting. The basic premise is to make the changes you can to reduce you carbon footprint and buy credits in companies that spend the money doing something that either reduces carbon dioxide emissions or absorbs them. There are a number of companies out there that sell carbon credits. A quick search found prices per tonne of carbon dioxide at anything between $12 and $110 per tonne. (source 1, source 2) These sites always have a list of the projects that they are investing in. They also will tell you what standards they adhere to how they are certified and verified.
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Comment by Candy — Wednesday, July 30, 2008 @ 11:36 am
[…] deceased biological material. Now this is a carbon based fuel. Like we talked about back in ‘What is One Tonne of Carbon?‘ plants take in water sunlight carbon dioxide and using photosynthesis produce sugar. That […]
Pingback by Run For One Planet Blog » Bio Fuel — Sunday, February 22, 2009 @ 10:07 pm
48lbs of Carbon dioxide may be what a mature tree absorbs, but young fast growing species, such as those used in short cycle coppice systems can be far more effective at producing tonnage of woody organic matter. While people like to see mature trees in their environment they are not necessarily the most effective way to offset carbon, nor the most economically viable.
Short Rotation Willow Coppice is one such wood crop which produces useful fuel products on a time-scale that makes it appealing for conventional farmers. When combined with technology that produces biochar as a by-product then we have a completely different scenario (biochar sequesters carbon permanently in soil) and the overall system is carbon negative.
You calculations also seem to imply that the woody mass of the trees planted is simply removed from the carbon cycle at the end of its life cycle. In reality while some of that carbon will be trapped in building timber the majority of it will return to the atmosphere, either burnt as firewood or through decomposition.
So, basing your calculation on a number of mature trees seems fundamentally flawed – they do not remove that carbon from the atmosphere permanently, and are not equivalent to not emitting the CO2 in the first place. At the very best planting trees delays the impact that your one tonne of carbon would have. Oh, and we would have to plant the same number of new trees next year too, and the year after that…
At best this is over simplified.
Comment by Mike — Saturday, September 26, 2009 @ 6:37 am
are you actually doing nothing but talking all you people do is talk
Comment by tony — Tuesday, January 12, 2010 @ 5:25 pm
Interesting but that $110 per tonne is a very high figure. I don’t think i’ve encountered any company that sells credits at that price.
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