Has anyone ever measured how much CO2 is locked away every year by landfill trash , ie newspapers?

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Has anyone ever measured how much CO2 is locked away every year by landfill trash , ie newspapers?

It seems that this is the easiest way to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and can be sustained fairly easily with fast growing trees. I Realize this doesn't sound eco-friendly but just a thought, it seems we are already creating future hydrocarbon deposits, geologically speaking.

Has anyone ever measured how much CO2 is locked away every year by landfill trash , ie newspapers?microsoft powerpoint

Since no one else has bothered to answer your question yet, I thought I would take a stab at it. Not that my information will be precise, but may be it will shed some light on how to quantify what would need to be done to show if this is feasible.

Based on the total coal, oil, natural gas, and any other carbon based fuel burned in a year, you must know the total amount in pounds and then know the percent of carbon in each type. Then, you could calculate the amount of carbon that would need to be buried. Trees, I believe are approx. 50% carbon, when completely dry, so approx. 2 pounds of dried wood per pound of carbon. The next problem is efficiently burying this material deep enough that the carbon is truly sequestered. Otherwise, the product will break down into CO2, methane, and other products that will escape and would negate the benefits. In fact, I would think that you would have to account for some of that happening.

One coal-fired plant that I live near burns 20,000 tons of coal A DAY. Every day. That's 40,000,000 pounds of coal a day. If the carbon content of the coal is 80%, then that is 32,000,000 pounds of carbon emitted as approximately 88,000,000 lbs of CO2. Assume a tree that would weigh 1,000 lbs when dried, it would take 2 of these trees to offset 1,000 lbs of carbon or approx. 64,000 trees per day to offset the carbon from this one plant.

Based on national numbers of 1026 million short tons of coal used in electricity production, that represents 2.05 trillion lbs of coal. Mulitply that by 80% to find carbon content gives 1.64 trillion pounds. Dividing that by the 1,000 pounds per tree and multiply by 2 because of the 50% carbon content of wood gives 1.64 billion trees per year or about 5 million trees per day.

Overall, while I can't say this is impossible, it does not seem to be the most cost effective way to perform this action. Remember, this number of trees only offsets the carbon released from burning coal in the production of electricity. There is another 88 million short tons (~8% more) coal used for other purposes as well as the millions of pounds of oil, gas, and natural gas burned every day. I would guess an additional 1- 2 million trees per day for natural gas burned for electricity and that doesn't count the oil used for gas. Assuming 20 million barrels a day of oil consumed in the US, 20*42*7 = 5.88 billion pounds of oil per day. Based on my rough calculations, that could add an additional 6 - 8 million trees for the oil. Therefore, the total number of trees required to balance the carbon from all these sources could be as high as 13-15 million trees per day.

Again, I am not saying it can't be done, but the magnitude of the solution may be not be the most economical way to remove carbon.