The question every year is : shaping tree or material tree ? What is the good environmental choice for a Christmas tree ?
Is one of your family Christmas tradition traveling to your local tree farm and cutting a freshChristmas tree ? Or do you drag a dusty box out of the Classical Greek and draw the plastic collapsible Christmas Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree out of it ?
consort to the American Christmas Tree Association , 95 million U.S. households will celebrate Christmas this year with a resilient or fake Christmas tree in their rest home . Roughly 50 million Christmas tree , whether live or faux , will be sold for the holiday celebration .
Of those 50 million Christmas trees , real trees will come about27 million and phoney trees 21 million . veridical Christmas trees will be mostly Scotch pine , Douglas true fir , Noble fir tree , Fraser fir tree , Balsam fir , Virginia pine tree or White true pine , available in one color : green ( or various shades of green ) . Fake trees are available in a multitude of color , from livid to green to gold to pink and more , some with lights build - in , and most are easy to collapse and store .
Are fake Christmas trees or real Christmas trees more eco-friendly?
There is an contention to be made for each .
Fake plastic Christmas trees
Supporters of bribe plastic Christmas tree made of PVC ( Polyvinyl chloride ) , brand , and Al , manufacture and shipped from China , claim that false trees have a lower carbon copy footmark if their owners hold on to them for six to 10 years . This is when compare to the vim take to cut and transport fresh trees and the carbon released into the atmospheric state when a tree is cut .
But complicate the parameter for plastic is the difficultness ofrecycling that Christmas Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree , which is usually tossed into a landfill where it will sit for ( literally ) a century or more . Polyvinyl chloride is difficult to impossible to recycle and so must be trash .
Real live Christmas trees
counsellor for buying areal Christmas treeargue that cutting impertinent fir , pine , and smarten up trees has benefits beyond that definitive holiday smell . buy from a Christmas tree farm supports local farmer who plant Acre of trees that take in carbon dioxide from the air , manage polluted storm - water overflow before it pours into waterways , and provide home ground for wildlife .
Real Christmas trees , they argue , have a smaller carbon footprint than plastic Tree . Environmental group estimate that an acre of fir trees absorbs more than 11,000 pounds of carbon dioxide every year and that carbon emissions created by family move around to purchase or cut a fresh Christmas tree diagram picket in comparison to the carbon output created by artificial tree manufacture and ship from China and eventually landfilled . Also , real trees can be recycle in a multitude of ways for everything from wood chip shot mulch to wildlife habitats .
purchase on Amazon : Christmas gift and holiday decorations .
8 Christmas tree facts:
A bailiwick by AVNIR , a collaborative research platform , Comparative Life Cycle Assessment ( LCA ) Of Artifical VS Natural Christmas Tree , arrange the carbon step argumentation into view : “ the emitted CO2 over the entire life cycle are approximately 3.1 kilo CO2 per year for the natural Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and 8.1 kg CO2 per yr for the artificial Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree ( 48.3 kilogram for its full life straddle ) . These CO2 emission roughly tally to driving an average automobile ( 150 M / kilometer ) 125 kilometer and 322 km , respectively . Therefore , carpooling or biking to work only one to three calendar week per year would offset the carbon emissions from both types of Christmas trees . ”
So there you have it – not much difference in the carbon footprint . Which leave behind 1 ) the necessity of the landfill for administration and 2 ) the inability to recycle as the big downside for artificial Christmas trees . Personally , I ’m a real Christmas Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree man . What ’s your preference ?
