LiveScience: For a greener Christmas, cut a real tree down.
Artificial Christmas trees (ahem) have a lot of appeal. They disassemble and fold up at the end of the holiday season and look just as good next year and the year after. The lights, on many models, come already neatly twined to the phone branches. There’s no driving anywhere to get it after the first time. Seems like a pretty eco-smart, economical thing to do… for many.
Wrong, at least about the eco-part, LiveScience‘s Andrea Thompson reports today. She cites as an authority a St. Joseph’s University biologist in Philadelphia. His primary argument is that if one adds up the energy and net carbon budgets of cut, real trees v. metal-and-petrochemical versions, the ones that grow on tree farms are the winners.
The story is a useful, consumer-oriented one that will reassure many people who might be feeling a little guilty while loading that perfect fir onto the car’s roof. The Tracker has two quibbles. One, Thompson should have asked about fire danger (you ever see one of those holiday safety ads showing a dried-out tree practically detonating when touched with a match?).
More important, while she sensibly reports the CO2 neutrality of real trees (returning when dead the CO2 they absorbed from the air while growing), she lets her source say this: When eventually the artificial tree with its inherent petroleum and natural gas-derived materials get into the landfill, “those greenhouse gases are lost forever..There’s really no opportunity to recycle those.” What does that mean? One asset, it would appear, of making plastics and such from coal, gas, or crude oil is that, maybe, their fossil carbon might return to the ground and stay there rather than get combusted or degraded quickly to add to the atmosphere’s carbon load. Burial in a landfill that stays sealed and hence in which the stuff is lost forever IS recycling.
Other outlets have been circulating the same thesis for the last week or so, citing other authorities. Here are a few:
- The Age (Australia) – Mex Cooper: Plastic Christmas trees ‘bad for environment’ ;
- Mountain View Voice (Calif) Kelsey Mesher: The Christmas tree conundrum ;
- Boston Globe – Christopher Muther: Christmas tree turf war ; He even tells us the names of the trade associations for real v. synthetic trees, and the claims and counter-claims they are exchanging.
- Chicago Tribune – Leslie Mann: Cut your own tree – it’s ‘greener’ ; Okay, sold on that, but not on one of the reasons given here. She writes that “they pump oxygen into the environment.” Yes – but is the world’s oxygen supply much of an issue?
- Charlie Petit
