How CitiLog Sequesters Carbon Dioxide

se·ques·ter - to remove or set apart

Trees are roughly 50% carbon (dry weight).(1) Trees remove CO2 from the atmosphere through the process of photosynthesis. In this process, green leaves utilize energy captured from sunlight to chemically combine water and carbon dioxide to produce sugars and oxygen. The sugars are used to produce carbon-based cellulose, the primary structural component of all plant cells. As a result, the carbon is tied up in all of a tree’s tissues – in its roots, stems, and leaves. (2)

Therefore, the fate of the tree determines the fate of that carbon. If the tree dies or is cut down, the carbon can either be released or sequestered. If the tree is ground up as mulch or wood chips the carbon will be released as the wood quickly decays. If the tree is used to make paper products the carbon will be released when those products are eventually disposed of. However, if the tree is used to make finished wood products like flooring, millwork or furniture, the carbon is locked in place inside the wood. Finished wood products can last for many generations, sometimes for hundreds of years. At CitiLog we recently upcycled building timbers from a demolition site that were nearly 200 years old. The upcycled wood was installed in a brand new office building. In essence, the carbon inside that wood has been locked in jail for 200 years, and is now starting its third century of confinement.

Think of the weight of the finished wood products that surround you. A well built chair may weigh 25 pounds, the molding and casework in a room may weigh 50 pounds, a good table can easily weigh over 100 pounds, a conference room table - hundreds of pounds. When you sit on that chair, at that table, you may be sitting on and around hundreds of pounds of stored carbon. Have you ever asked yourself where that wood came from? Was a perfectly healthy tree in a timber forest cut down in a logging operation, or was a tree saved to make that table and chair?

The beauty of what CitiLog, CampusLog, and CitiWood Works do is that we take trees that have died, are toppled by weather, are being removed for a new building, or wood that is saved from a demolition project and we lock up the carbon. Without us that tree would end up in a landfill, or more likely as mulch. Instead it is used to build products that would otherwise require the downing of yet another tree by a lumber mill. Not only do we save the first tree - the tree that has or will soon die - but we keep a perfectly healthy new tree from being cut down. The carbon in the dead tree is locked in place - in some of the most beautiful wood work you will ever see - and the new tree that is not cut down continues to sequester carbon as it goes on living. Through the years we have helped sequester countless tons of carbon that would otherwise have been released into the atmosphere, and we have kept countless other trees from being cut down so that they can continue to sequester more carbon.

(1) Forest Ecology Network - reference link
(2) Forest Ecology Network - reference link