It takes the wood from a 100-foot tree to keep the average American supplied with
wood products for a year. On the average, that's 613 pounds of paper products, 200
square feet of inch thick lumber, 87 square feet of plywood, and 59 square feet
of insulating board, particleboard, and hardboard used by each of us in a year.
Your tree has taken 60 years to accumulate:
3,600 pounds of leaves
4,100 pounds of wood and bark
1,300 pounds of roots, (plus another 2,000 pounds grown and discarded)
Your tree needs:
TIME: 60 years, more or less
SUNLIGHT: necessary for conversion of nutrients and energy to wood fiber
SOIL: about 100 pounds of nutrients retained and more than 200 pounds recycled
to the soil
WATER: A tree may lift a ton of water a day. A tree uses 55 pounds of water
to make 100 pounds of cellulose, but it evaporates more than 90,000 pounds in the
process.
AIR: Scientists calculate that for every ton of wood a forest grows, it removes
1.45 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and replaces it with 1.07 tons of
oxygen. In an old-growth forest, the photosynthesis of the tree declines. Replacing
old trees with young, vigorously growing ones, therefore, contributes not only to
wood supplies, but also to the world's oxygen recycling system.
Did You Know?
Bark can be very thin, ¼ inch on a birch tree, or very thick, up to 2 feet on a giant Sequoia.
It takes forty gallons of sugar maple sap to make one gallon of maple syrup.
Almost a third of the world's total land area is covered by forests.
A well-positioned shade tree can keep a house 20% cooler in the summer.
Each year, enough firewood is used in the U.S. to build a 100 foot tall wall of wood from New York City to San Francisco.
Nearly half of the world's population depends on wood as its major source of fuel for heating and cooking.
The oldest known living tree is a bristlecone pine that's estimated to be 4,600 years old.
Some scientists estimate that more than 19 acres of tropical forest in Central and South America are being deforested every minute.
The tallest redwood ever measured was 367 feet tall. That's 62 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty.
Forest land contributes only 5% of the sediment to rivers and streams that non-forested lands contribute.
Tree fibers and paper pulping residues are converted into more than 5,000 products each day, including: paper products, solid wood products (furniture, toothpicks, charcoal), bark (cork, shoe polish, anticancer drugs), wood alcohols (colognes, solvents), torula yeast (baby foods, vegetarian foods, cereals), cellulose (rayon clothing, food additives, adhesives), and lignosulfates (cleaning compounds, deodorants, treatment of hypertension and Parkinson's disease).
