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10 <br /> pounds of carbon. Decomposed and converted back into carbon dioxide, this becomes 11,000 <br /> pounds of CO2.'This is the greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to burning 5,589 pounds of <br /> coal, 561 gallons of gasoline, or 229 cylinders of those propane cylinders used for backyard <br /> barbecues.' Every day, therefore, tree services like ours facilitate the rapid and wasteful release <br /> of many tons of greenhouse gasses due to their inability to repurpose logs and woody material <br /> as biofuel or wood products. Running four crews, I imagine our company as wastefully burning <br /> off two thousand gallons of gasoline daily simply because we are stuck with the status quo. <br /> While we also seek to have a positive environmental impact through tree planting and <br /> arboriculture education, nothing matches our opportunity to effectively reduce wood wastage. <br /> Again, using the EPA's greenhouse gas equivalencies calculator, we would have to grow over <br /> eighty tree seedlings for ten years to sequester the carbon equivalent of just one truckload of <br /> wood chips. <br /> The present situation of tree logs is also alarmingly wasteful. This has recently come to <br /> attention in North Carolina House Bill 295. This bill, which offers assistance to NC sawmills, is <br /> supported by the NC House of Representatives and the NC Senate Agriculture Committee. <br /> Randall Williams, a coauthor of this bill and sawmill operator in Orange County, explains: <br /> Like most states, North Carolina's lumber market is international, not local. Most of the <br /> lumber that people get at big box stores is shipped across the continent from clearcuts <br /> in the Pacific Northwest and Canada. Sometimes it comes from as far away as Romania, <br /> Sweden, and Germany. Meanwhile, local logs often get dumped in the landfill. Why? <br /> Most big lumber companies have contracts with international log suppliers; they rarely <br /> source from local loggers, landowners, farmers, and arborists. For those N.C. <br /> wood-based businesses, the prices they get for their logs is so low that they rarely make <br /> a profit hauling them. Sometimes, local log haulers get as little as $25/ton for their <br /> loads. As the Wall Street Journal has pointed out, most small landowners and loggers are <br /> getting 1990s prices for timber. <br /> Due to the low price per ton mentioned above, North Carolina has lost almost half of its <br /> sawmills since 2001.5 This dearth of available processing facilities, along with the low price for <br /> logs, decreases the feasibility of getting logs harvested from residential trees to suitable <br /> sawmills. The result is that trees harvest by local tree services almost always end up in the <br /> waste stream, to the disadvantage of the environment, the waste reduction goals of Orange <br /> 3 Since CO2 is only 27% by weight carbon, multiplying the pounds of carbon by 3.7 yields the amount of <br /> CO2 produced. As wood chips decompose most of the carbon is released as CO2 (exposed to air and <br /> moisture, precious little carbon remains stable as humus). <br /> a https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator. <br /> e The North Carolina Sawmill Industry: A Closer Look. NC State Extension Publications <br /> 3 <br />