There’s a little bit of logic to thinking that Christmas trees are bad for the environment. It’s about the trees getting chopped down! That has to be bad, right?
Maybe not, according to BBC Future writer Jocelyn Timperley, who took a look at the pros and cons of the Christmas tree industry, carefully weighing the merits of real Christmas trees against artificial ones.
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The Western cultural tradition of chopping down a tree, moving it into your home, and decorating it to make it look pretty has been around since the 1800s and traces its roots back to Germany. It was usually a tradition carried on by the upper classes that became trendy and caught on with the lower classes.
Nowadays, it’s a household staple regardless of economic class. That’s a lot of trees in a lot of homes—for about a month per year, at least. Obviously, that raises questions about sustainability.
Jocelyn spoke to a forest ecologist at the University of Vermont named Alexandria Kosiba who says that Christmas trees grown on plantations are often a boon for rural economies and help to maintain the lush greens of rural landscapes. Those plantations also act as a small but still beneficial way of helping to pull carbon from the air.
The mere idea of a Christmas tree farm might conjure images of seeds planted in January that turn into mighty six-foot Douglas firs chopped down at the end of November, creating a constant cycle of growth and death. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Christmas tree plantations grow their trees for about 10 years before they’re harvested.
When one batch is chopped down, it’s soon replaced with another that will take another 10 years to fully mature before that one is chopped down. In all that time, those trees will be pulling carbon from the air to help clean up the planet just a little bit.
These plantations are also home to various animals that call these trees home. The con with that idea is that some of these farms use pesticides that cause harm to the insects and animals that call these trees home.
A Christmas tree tossed into a landfill will release methane as it decomposes but at least it’ll decompose in relatively no time compared to an artificial tree made from plastic and metal that will take centuries to break down in the same landfill.
If convenience is your thing, then you’re probably never going to be convinced that an artificial tree isn’t your best bet. Break them down and shove them in a closet until you need them again next December. But if you’re choosing an artificial tree over a real one for environmental concerns, considering all the emissions that go into making fake trees, a real tree is probably still your safest bet, even if you do have to deal with all those damn needles on the floor.
