Burning wood is environmentally friendly, do you believe it?

Why is burning firewood environmentally friendly?

Firewood is a typical biomass energy source, most of which comes from trees, some from crops, and a few from other sources.

Some people say that you can't burn firewood, and if you do, it releases carbon dioxide, which is no different from burning oil. This is typically short-sighted, so why don't you look at where trees come from?

Through the study of photosynthesis, people have realised that almost all the carbon in trees is produced by absorbing carbon dioxide from the air, and that the tree's root system provides enough water to synthesise the tree as a biomass material, which doesn't consume the soil during growth, but only a small amount of nutrients in the soil, which is negligible in terms of the weight ratio.

In this way, burning firewood is a carbon emitting process; growing trees is a carbon sequestering process. The total amount of carbon burned is the same as the total amount of carbon fixed by the trees during their growth in previous years! So the single greatest characteristic of biomass energy, represented by firewood, is its carbon balance, with renewability, storage, substitutability and huge storage capacity being a few other key features.

It is a major premise that once trees are harvested and utilised in excess of their regenerative capacity, the resource is depleted. Fortunately, the annual growth of forest trees is so huge that the total energy is equivalent to seven to eight times the world's disposable energy, and the world's energy needs could be met by utilising only one-tenth of that amount.

Moreover, forests themselves need to be maintained, and the trees themselves or the forest system follow a natural pattern of overlapping ageing and regeneration. Aging trees grow slowly, or even stop growing, and lose their carbon sequestration role; while newborn trees grow faster and sequester carbon at a very high rate and volume. Therefore, the orderly harvesting and utilisation of forests is more important from an environmental point of view than the purely natural turnover of trees. Those who have been to primitive forests will remember vividly the old and decaying trees lying there, all of which were eventually rotted away by nature.

As long as to ensure reasonable harvesting and renewal, a lot of environmental issues can be solved, do pure wood furniture may be regarded as an environmentally friendly behaviour, because it will increase the fixed carbon, and the use of chemical products of synthetic panels of furniture only to be despised; if the recycling to do a good job, and even the use of wooden chopsticks is no longer going to be what the environmental issues.

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