Home - For Our Globe - Sustainable Forestry

Sustainable Forestry Practices are Critical

WoodPellets.com joins with the Alliance for Green Heat, the Biomass Thermal Energy Council and the Pellet Fuels Institute in working to ensure that biomass harvesting is conducted in a sustainable manner.

I believe cutting down trees is bad – how can I burn wood pellets?

Actually, whether trees fall or are cut is not the issue. What matters is the rate of planting and growth of trees. It is through plant growth that carbon is removed from the atmosphere and turned into wood (a hydrocarbon). So cutting down trees to make parking lots is clearly a huge problem.

But just as younger people grow faster than older people, it is actually true that modern forestry practices such as over-story removal (whereby older trees are carefully removed, allowing younger trees ample sunlight to grow rapidly) actually improve the rate of carbon removal from the atmosphere. Ironically, sometimes the goal of the forest landowner and the environmentalist are well aligned – both want to pull as much carbon out of the atmosphere as possible, and to convert that carbon into wood.

It is also important to note that the large majority of wood pellets are NOT made by cutting down trees in the first place. The value of wood pellets is not high enough to warrant the cost of cutting down trees, so trees are cut for lumber or other purposes, and it is actually the waste products of those operations which are typically recycled into wood pellets. The wood pellets we sell that do come from whole trees come from dead trees, which the forest service has asked to be removed from forests due to fire hazards.