How many trees do you have to plant to erase your carbon footprint (or become carbon zero)?

Question

I had read somewhere that it's between 16 and 20. Is that per year or in a lifetime? Does that include all of the paper/wood products you consume?

Answer 1

Trees breath in carbon dioxide when they are alive. This carbon then enters the atmosphere again as the trees decay over a period of more than 5000 years.

You cannot completely remove your carbon footprint by planting trees.

Answer 2

Start by figuring out your carbon footprint. Here's a good site:

http://www.climatecrisis.net/takeaction/carboncalculator/

(Great movie too - if you care about your carbon footprint, you've got to see this!)

The average American produces 15,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per year (from the above site, this roughly agrees with other sites I looked at).

Getting data on how much carbon dioxide a tree takes up per year was trickier. Of course, it depends on the age, type and size of tree, climate, soil conditions, etc. Most sites were saying something in the range of 18-48 pounds per year, but I saw a lot of variation.

If that's right, it's not a lot. Gives you a hint of the trouble we're in.

Let's say you're an average American, and your trees would average 30 pounds a year. That means you'd need to plant 500 trees.

Answer 3

I agree with JaGa, but planting is too simple. The figure quoted for carbon taken up by a tree is almost surely for a mature, or large tree. A seedling would take up much less. So you need to KEEP a large number of MATURE trees GROWING to offset your carbon footprint. And when one of those trees dies of old age, you must preserve the wood to prevent it from decaying, because the decay will release ALL the carbon the tree took up in it's life back into the environment. So the best way to save the Earth with trees is to plant lots of them, cut them down BEFORE they die, make long lasting wood products from them, like tables and houses, and plant more to replace them. And keep doing that. The result is that all the coal and oil that has been burned would be recycled back from the air into furniture and houses. I think you can see that this would be impractical. The bottom line is that you cannot save the planet by planting trees. We MUST reduce our production of carbon dioxide by not burning coal, oil and natural gas. But if we have to burn one of those, natural gas is the best, because it is mostly hydrogen, with very little carbon in it. Worst is coal, which is all carbon. Oil is in the middle with some hydrogen and some carbon.

Answer 4

That would probably be per month. Consider everything.