Sustainability in Surrey ?

Trees in Surrey

Trees are the main bright spot for sustainability in Surrey

• Surrey has 37,564 ha of woodland, 22.4% of the area of the county (this equals 145 square miles, or nearly 93,000 acres). This figure excludes woods under 0.1 ha, lines of trees, and single trees. The national average area of woodlands is 11.6% (source)
• As the woods are fairly old, I have taken a value of 300 trees per hectare
• This gives an estimated 11 million trees in Surrey's woods
• Added to this, there are more than 692,000 non-woodland trees larger than 8" diameter (Nationally the total is 123 million non-woodland trees)
• Including 300,000 garden trees, there are at least 12 million trees in Surrey
• In the woodland surveys, only trees over 2m height have been counted, and small trees such as hawthorn and blackthorn may be excluded
• This total of 12 million trees is a (deliberately) low estimate, and I hope to improve this figure as time goes by. More information might be gained from the national inventory of trees which can be downloaded from the UK Forestry Survey
• This extends to about 12 trees per person in Surrey
  

Surrey County Council has extensive web pages of information on trees and woodland.

It should be noted that, although there are large quatnities of wood available in Surrey, no-one really knows what to do with it - there are few locally produced products made from wood, or any other applications available for it, such as wood products or charcoal. Most of the wood is wasted. I think there is insufficient water for large-scale paper-making to be carried out in Surrey.

In Surrey, we have:

• 1.06 million people
• 0.52 cars/person (550,000 total)
• the cars use 350,000 tons petrol
• we use 550,000+ tons of oil for domestic and business (gas, electric, coal, etc.)
  
• our agriculture grows an estimated 1% of the food consumed
• we produce 580,000 tons of household waste a year plus more waste from shops, offices, etc
• about 18% is recycled
• we produce 580,000 tons sewage
• we use 58 million tons water
• we have about 12 million trees

Trees on Epsom Common