Greening Milwaukee

While there are plenty of other convincing reasons to plant trees, you should also know that trees can you save and make money! Here are some of the ways they work to help your pocketbook:

Direct benefits:

	Trees can help reduce heating and cooling costs by shading buildings, acting as windbreaks, and cooling the air through the evaporative process of transpiration; they also reflect and absorb solar radiation before it heats the dense building and pavement materials of a home or office.

	Unlike your car, a tree increases in value as it ages. So a tree is a good investment.

	An average 25-foot tree can reduce heating and cooling costs by 8 to 10 percent in an average American home; projections from Tree People of Beverly Hills states that three trees placed appropriately around a single family home can cut air conditioning needs by 50%

	Landscapes provide an average 15% increase in property value for both residential and business locations

	Fruit harvested from community orchards can be sold, thus providing income and creating economic opportunities

	Trees provide several benefits to businesses by offering an attractive setting and sending a positive message to both shoppers and visitors

Indirect benefit:

An entire community or region will benefit from lower electricity bills when the tree cover increases. More trees means less energy for cooling and heating. That means power companies are able to use less water in their cooling towers, build fewer new facilities to meet peak demands, use reduced amounts of fossil fuel in their furnaces, and need fewer measures to control air pollution. Communities can also save if fewer facilities must be built to control storm water in the region. To the individual these savings are small, but to the community, reductions in these expenses are often in the thousands of dollars.