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In the US PNW coast area Douglas Fir trees are harvested for lumber within about 30 years, plus or minus. Maybe the person you were talking to was considering the harvest of the tree to be the moment when the CO2 is "reclaimed"?
Wrt to when the tree pays off the carbon footprint generated by raising and planting the seedling, I guess it's less than three years.
Fun fact: Douglas Fir reach peak carbon fixation rate at about 120 years.
I highly question this. A Dougie at 30 is about a foot across. I just took 7 Dougie's down on my lot, the largest was 24in at chest height. I can see Puget sound from my place. In fact, I actually counted the rings on one of them and it was 101 years old. Shit. Now I'm gonna go look and measure the 30. I dyed every fifth ring when I counted it initially.
K, so at 30y/o the only stump I left in the ground was only 8.5 inches across and 20in in diameter at 101, so that's an easy 24in with the bark. The tree was 120ft tall when I felled it in July. A real shame too, I wanted to keep all of them but fire damage. The next day beetles had already hit all of them. I dropped the trees a week after the fire and debarked them to help protect the wood before i could mill them, and there were hundreds of beetle tracks under the burned bark. Pine beetles live under the bark, in the cambium, no bark=no beetle. But the California wood wasps showed up the day I dropped the bark. Those things are terrifying, jet black, 2.5 inches long with an inch long stinger on top of that, so about the width of your palm. Adult pine beetles are about 3inches long when they emerge too. Wicked little fuckers, the both of them