With all the talk of carbon emissions we’ve been looking into ways to reduce our carbon footprint. Possum New Zealand’s already committed to recycling (both waste and stock), but we’ve been looking at how making small changes adds up to the greater whole.

We’ve always recycled our scraps of Possum fur for trimming eco-bags (made from recycled plastic), making pompoms, stuffing cushions and our cute Possycat toy. Our Possum Merino T-Cozy hat was created solely to utilize leftovers from the knitters.

In the office it’s things like: not running the air conditioner, turning off computers and other devices at the wall and turning office lights off when we’re not using them.

This got us thinking about how Possum’s negatively impact our carbon footprint. We heard them called ‘carbon junkies’ the other day, because of the amount of vegetation they destroy. One fully grown tree can absorb over 20kgs of Carbon Dioxide every year. When you think that Possums are munching through 20,000 tons of bush every night (!) you realise what a problem this is!

Trees are the cheapest, and one of the most effective ways of removing Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere, not to mention returning Oxygen. By removing Possums from the eco-system, we’re protecting the native fauna from an introduced predator, AND increasing carbon storage from the atmosphere, as the trees continue to grow.

That alone is a persuasive argument for a commercially-driven eradication plan, especially when you consider that around 30% of New Zealand (8.2 million hectares or over 20 million acres) is forest anyway.