YOUR CAR AND TREES

Do you feel a prick of conscience about the amount of pollution, you are emitting into the atmosphere every time you go out in…

Do you feel a prick of conscience about the amount of pollution, you are emitting into the atmosphere every time you go out in your car? In Britain, a project called Future Forests suggests drivers can assuage their guilt with a new tree planting scheme. They need to plant ten trees every year they drive, from now on, that is. A newspaper says this can be done, in Britain, for a cost of £30, which seems little for ten trees.

Schemes like this have grown out of the big UN conferences of a few years ago, notably that one in Rio, on global warming. The British scheme was launched east of London at a place called Thames Chase. Modest enough, with a mere 100 trees, but a start.

Various community trusts such as the Woodlands Trust and officials of the big National Forest taking place in the Midlands, and landowners, the article says, are being consulted. The organisers already have 500,000 tree sites agreed nationally, with an other half million promised.

And here comes a strange statistic: an average motor car emits four times its own weight of carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the air each year. A spokesman for the body Future Forests puts it this way: that by planting ten trees every year you drive, you are "sequestering" or setting aside your pollution.

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How many cars have we in Ireland? In Britain, they have 24 million or so. To offset their emissions, says the article, 100,000 hectares of trees would have to be planted every year. England's tree cover is given as being only three per cent of the land. And a scientist at the Forestry Commission's research station in Farnham is quoted as saying: "There is plenty of scope for expanding the area of forests in Britain. The originators of the scheme says they will use trees from native seed only.

The £3 covers growing costs for each tree. What about our exhaust pipes and our trees? Any comparison? Or do our windier coasts diminish the problem?