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pounds of carbon. Decomposed and converted back into carbon dioxide, this becomes 11,000 pounds of C02.3 This is the greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to burning 5,589 pounds of coal, 561 gallons of gasoline, or 229 cylinders of those propane cylinders used for backyard barbecues.4 Every day, therefore, tree services like ours facilitate the rapid and wasteful release of many tons of greenhouse gasses due to their inability to repurpose logs and woody material as biofuel or wood products. Running four crews, I imagine our company as wastefully burning off two thousand gallons of gasoline daily simply because we are stuck with the status quo. While we also seek to have a positive environmental impact through tree planting and arboriculture education, nothing matches our opportunity to effectively reduce wood wastage. Again, using the EPA’s greenhouse gas equivalencies calculator, we would have to grow over eighty tree seedlings for ten years to sequester the carbon equivalent of just one truckload of wood chips. The present situation of tree logs is also alarmingly wasteful. This has recently come to attention in North Carolina House Bill 295. This bill, which offers assistance to NC sawmills, is supported by the NC House of Representatives and the NC Senate Agriculture Committee. Randall Williams, a coauthor of this bill and sawmill operator in Orange County,explains: Like most states, North Carolina’s lumber market is international, not local. Most of the lumber that people get at big box stores is shipped across the continent from clearcuts in the Pacific Northwest and Canada. Sometimes it comes from as far away as Romania, Sweden, and Germany. Meanwhile, local logs often get dumped in the landfill. Why? Most big lumber companies have contracts with international log suppliers; they rarely source from local loggers, landowners, farmers, and arborists. For those N.C. wood-based businesses, the prices they get for their logs is so low that they rarely make a profit hauling them. Sometimes, local log haulers get as little as $25/ton for their loads. As the Wall Street Journal has pointed out, most small landowners and loggers are getting 1990s prices for timber. Due to the low price per ton mentioned above, North Carolina has lost almost half of its sawmills since 2001. 5 This dearth of available processing facilities, along with the low price for logs, decreases the feasibility of getting logs harvested from residential trees to suitable sawmills. The result is that trees harvest by local tree services almost always end up in the waste stream, to the disadvantage of the environment, the waste reduction goals of Orange 5 The North Carolina Sawmill Industry: A Closer Look. NC State Extension Publications 4 https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator. 3 Since C02 is only 27% by weight carbon, multiplying the pounds of carbon by 3.7 yields the amount of C02 produced. As wood chips decompose most of the carbon is released as C02 (exposed to air and moisture, precious little carbon remains stable as humus). 3 20