Lillien and Frank Gilbreth were real-life parents of twelve real-life children, and have been the subject of mostly biographical books and movies under the moniker “Cheaper by the Dozen.” Usually they involve all sorts of zany, mad-cap adventures, and don’t forget the precocious kids who constantly outwit school authorities, law enforcement, and even their own parents!
Less famously but perhaps just as significantly, Frank and Lillien really did pioneer “Time and Motion” studies, in which they carefully measured the labor necessary to achieve an industrial objective. Between them Lillien was the real star, but in the days of gender inequality, she did not directly receive the credit she deserved. in some circles Frank and Lillien are considered the inventors of management consulting.
In the spirit of the Gilbreaths, I conducted a time and motion study to figure out whether individuals could realistically participate, “by the sweat of their brow,” in the process of off-setting the carbon they generate each year.
More specifically I wanted to find out how much time is necessary to remove enough dead wood from an ecologically sensitive forest floor to sequester a metric ton of Co2 from the environment. My study depended–as would Let’s Own This!–on the availability of carbon neutral equipment to cut wood and move it across long distances, like battery-powered chainsaws and small and large battery-powered vehicles.
Answer for me: 45 minutes per ton of Co2. In a comfortable full day on a vacation, my answer would probably be something like enough wood to remove 3 metric tons of Co2. So, for example, if I were in the mountains skiing for a week, I might spend two hours a day in the morning moving wood before I head off to the slopes. Over the course of five days I would have sequestered enough wood to keep 15 tons of Co2 out of the environment, which is the high end of an individual carbon footprint in the United States.
The TMI details:
- I am a 54 year old male, a little overweight but generally in good shape. I exercise 3-5 times a week.
- By the end of the 45 minutes I was pretty tired. It would have been better to slow down, spend an hour, and work at a pace as though I were chatting with a friend while working.
- Sometimes I used the ‘bend over’ or ‘deep knee bend’ method of picking up wood from the ground, instead of using the pictured tool (name brand “Unger”). If I used the tool more often I would have probably expended less energy. It would be good to experiment with a wide range of other handtools. Similarly, lifting heavier pieces in a team might have been an option sometimes, and I am aware of methods for doing so. This might have both increased efficiency, and reduced monotony.
- The Unger tool pictured was not the perfect tool. It had rubber grips on the bottom and I could have picked up bigger pieces more effectively if there were some kind of metal spikes or teeth instead. I also practiced using opposite hands, which worked fairly well (I am pretty strongly right-hand dominant).
- I dumped out the 67 lb. load of wood from the pictured wheel barrow 18 times, loaded it using the tool or the deep-knee bend method, then rolled it about 30 yards up and down slight slopes, then dumped it out again. Sometimes I distributed the wood over a 10 square yard area and gathered it up, and sometimes I left it in a pile to experiment with the tool. In a real forest, a wheelbarrow would probably need to wheel further, or might not even be possible to use, and the slope might be steeper.
- The metric ton of CO2 Math: Dead dry wood is about 50% carbon. A metric ton of CO2 is 2,205 pounds. Hence, there are 1,102 pounds of carbon in a dry metric ton of wood. When burned or de-composed, a pound of carbon becomes 3.67 pounds of CO2 (because of the attached molecular weight of the oxygen in CO2). Divide 1,201 pounds of carbon by 3.67 (ratio to CO2) and divide that quantity by .5 (ratio of carbon in wood) to calculate the weight of wood necessary to remove from the forest floor necessary to sequester a ton of CO2, which is 1,201 pounds
