Trees are very good at storing Co2 but once a forest is fully grown, the storage capacity reaches its maximum below 500 tons of Co2 per hectare. The trees keep growing as long as they live, but other trees die because they end up in the shade of the big ones, because they get blown over in a storm or through wildfires and pests. If we want a forest to grow the storage capacity beyond the 500 tons mark, we must remove the fully grown ones to make space for new seedlings that we plant. The harvested trees are preserved for ever by driving them in deep layers of peat and clay. This way, if we preserve 2% of the forest every year, we will have 500 tons preserved plus the 500 tons in the forest after 50 years. The forest has doubled its capacity to remove Co2 from the atmosphere and the good thing is, the preserved wood is forever out of reach for disasters. There are 25 million wooden piles already in the saturated soils of Holland so there’s ample scientific proof that this method of removing Co2 has zero emissions in millennia for spruce.
With the approach of Underground Forest the wood that is preserved doesn’t only store Co2, but it is put to a second use as foundations for building projects, thus making it possible to build homes that remove more Co2 from the atmosphere that the building materials on top and the building process itself has emitted.
About the Remover
These credits are from a project in Haastrecht, in the province of Zuid-Holland in the Netherlands, where a farm decided to build a road constructed on a wooden foundation.