ZAP’S FACTS!
TREES

A big tree can make enough oxygen for two people to breathe.

Plants exhale oxygen as a waste product of photosynthesis - and we'd all suffocate without them.

2 min read
A big tree can make enough oxygen for two people to breathe.
THE FULL STORY

Every leaf on a tree is basically a little oxygen factory. Using sunlight, leaves split water molecules apart to power photosynthesis. The hydrogen gets used to build sugar, and the leftover oxygen is dumped out as a waste product. That waste is the air we breathe.

A single big mature tree pumps out roughly 100 kilograms of oxygen a year - enough to keep one or two people alive. Multiply that by the trillions of trees on Earth and you get an unimaginable amount of breathable air recycled every day.

Trees aren’t the only oxygen-makers, though. Microscopic ocean plants called phytoplankton produce more than half of all the oxygen on Earth. So every other breath you take, roughly, came from a tiny floating sea organism you’ve never seen.

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