Tag - Environment

Celebrating 5 Years by offsetting our Carbon for 2021!

Wow. FIVE years.

It’s been a crazy road to where we are today. Colorado Trees started off as one man (Mark, owner) and a truck and a boat trailer. Mark worked hard and cut trees alone, dragged brush alone, loaded brush on his raft trailer and tied it down alone, booked jobs, did invoices and estimates and built this company through blood, sweat, and sometimes tears. We aren’t too proud to admit that!

Today, Colorado Trees is still mostly run by Mark in many facets, but he’s added a truck, a chipper, more chainsaws, ground crew, and climbers. Mark studied hard and became a certified Arborist and then did two years of training to become a Qualified Supervisor with the Department of Agriculture.  He uses this knowledge to diagnose and treat trees for many situations. Keeping trees healthy and happy is his passion. That passion for trees continues today. Since day one we have thought about how to replace the trees that have had to come down. Being a cog in the health of our environment is important.

Taking down dead trees and keeping trees beautiful is important to our environment but taking them down also takes a BIG truck that emits Carbon Dioxide (CO2). Running a big chipper to chip dead branches uses fuel and emits carbon. Running a chainsaw uses fuel and emits Carbon. To celebrate five years, we wanted to make a positive impact on the environment in a BIG way.

That’s why we’ve partnered with Native, a Public Benefit Corporation and the Medford Spring Grasslands Conservation Project in southeastern Colorado. With this partnership we pledge to offset 100% of our carbon footprint made by our diesel work truck, our wood chipper, and our chainsaws. The fuel used for us to trim, treat and remove trees is 220 tCO2e which is equal to eliminating the carbon from 26.5 homes energy use for an entire year.

How? Grasslands store one-third of the Earth’s carbon, and just one acre of grassland can store an estimated 50 tonnes of carbon or more. Yet, in the U.S., over one million acres of grassland are still converted each year, which has the potential to release 50%-70% of the carbon they hold as carbon dioxide (CO₂). Colorado’s shortgrass prairie The Medford Spring grasslands, hosts bison and black-tailed prairie dogs will help limit shrub and tree encroachment and preserve habitats for native swift fox, ferruginous hawks, burrowing owls, elk, pronghorn antelope, and the mountain plover. This eco-system is important to essentially “pull down” negative CO2 and hold it in the soil and release what you can call “good carbon” back in the air.

We are currently supporting the Medford Springs Grasslands project through Native to offset the 220 tonnes of CO2 we will emit this year essentially ending at net ZERO for 2021.

Choosing CO trees for your trim or removal not only means incredible customer service, fair pricing, and unparalleled expertise, it also means giving back and making our world a better, cleaner place. We believe we can all make change.

Read more...