Are real Christmas trees much better for the planet than fake ones?

It’s a little logical to think that Christmas trees are harmful to the environment. It’s about cutting down the trees! That has to be bad, right?

Maybe not, says BBC Future writer Jocelyn Timperley, who looks at the pros and cons of the Christmas tree industry and carefully weighs up the merits of real Christmas trees versus artificial ones.

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The Western cultural tradition of cutting down a tree, bringing it into your home, and decorating it beautifully has been around since the 19th century and its roots go back to Germany. Typically, this was a tradition carried on by the upper classes that became fashionable and appealed to the lower classes.

Nowadays, it is a staple food for every household, regardless of economic class. That’s a lot of trees in a lot of houses – at least for about a month of the year. This of course raises questions about sustainability.

Jocelyn spoke with a forest ecologist at the University of Vermont named Alexandria Kosiba, who says plantation-grown Christmas trees are often a boon to rural economies and help maintain the lush greenery of rural landscapes. These plantations are also a small but still useful way to remove carbon from the air.

The very idea of ​​a Christmas tree farm might conjure up images of seeds planted in January turning into massive, six-foot-tall Douglas firs being cut down in late November, creating a constant cycle of growth and death. This couldn’t be further from the truth. On Christmas tree plantations, the trees grow for about ten years before they are harvested.

When one batch is cut down, it will soon be replaced by another, which will take another 10 years to fully mature before this one is cut down. In all this time, these trees will remove carbon from the air, helping to clean up the planet a little.

These plantations are also home to various animals that call these trees home. The downside to this idea is that some of these farms use pesticides that harm the insects and animals that call these trees home.

A Christmas tree thrown into a landfill releases methane as it decomposes, but at least it decomposes in a relatively short period of time, compared to an artificial tree made of plastic and metal that takes centuries to decompose in the same landfill.

If convenience is your thing, you’ll probably never be convinced that an artificial tree isn’t the best choice. Disassemble them and store them in a closet until you need them again next December. However, if you’re choosing an artificial tree over a real one for environmental reasons, given the emissions involved in making artificial trees, a real tree is probably still the safest choice, even if you have to deal with all those damn needles on the floor.