This article has been updated. It originally published on Dec. 6, 2024.
Each year, Americans buy between 25 million and 30 million real Christmas trees and 10 million fake ones. And each year, a question as traditional as O Tannenbaum itself swirls around sustainability circles: Which kind is gentler on the planet? The answer: It depends.
The first thing to understand is that real trees are not as bad as some folks might think. “It’s not like we’re contributing to deforestation by having a Christmas tree,” says Bert Cregg, a forestry professor at Michigan State University. “A lot of it gets down to this notion that people can’t get over cutting down a tree.”
The real point, he says, is to think of a Christmas tree like a soybean or a tomato: a crop grown for a specific purpose. Most are farmed and take seven to eight years to mature and do suck up carbon while they’re alive.
Tree physiologists are also building a new understanding around the amount of CO2 trees permanently deposit in the soil as they grow, which could change the math on The Great Christmas Tree Debate. “That below-ground piece, that soil piece? That’s something that’s not well understood that has the biggest potential, because everything else happens above ground,” Cregg says.
But does that also mean that any real fir is superior to a fake one? “There’s not really an answer,” Cregg says, noting that planet-warming potential is only part of the sustainability puzzle. Depending on how you handle your seasonal greenery—and how long you hang on to it—a pretend pine could reasonably win out.
To help unwrap the nuances, we ranked the options based on environmental impact and how accessible they are for average Americans. Spoiler: Even if the real-versus-fake debate may end in a coin toss, there is another option that wins out no matter what.
Good: A fake tree you keep for years
The upshot: The carbon it takes to make a faux fir and get it to you stays locked in that sucker as long as you keep it. But for it to be better than a real pine, you’ve gotta hang onto it for a decade or more.
Yes, stand-in trees are plastic, usually made in China, and extremely hard to recycle. Making one fake tree also consumes nearly three times the energy and produces more than 3.5 times the greenhouse emissions of a real one, according to a 2018 life-cycle analysis conducted for the American Christmas Tree Association (ACTA), a trade group that, despite what its name might seem to imply, represents the artificial-tree industry.
The thing to keep in mind is that those estimates only cover year one, and it’d be bananas to invest in a faux fir and junk it after a single season. If you buy a new falsie and commit to hanging on to it, it’ll eventually get into the, uh, green.
The exact tipping point varies not only depending on the size of the tree and how it’s made and disposed of, but also on which environmental factors you consider. When you tabulate greenhouse gases and all other impacts, many estimates, including ACTA’s, put breakeven anywhere between five and 20 years. If you want to be safe, stick to the higher end of the lifespan. It’s hefty, but it’s also perfectly doable when you consider that most folks keep fakies for a decade or more.
Stretching out the life of a fake tree will be easier if you invest in a high-quality model from a stalwart brand like Balsam Hill. It’s also a good idea to avoid options with white flocking or pre-strung lights, which can break and be hard to replace. Finally, consider not only what fits best in your space but also the size of the box and if it’s manageable for you to store.
Better: A real, local tree you turn into mulch
The upshot: Schlepping trees around and disposing of them accounts for a big piece of their carbon puzzle, which means staying as local as you can and planning a responsible end-of-life both matter a lot.
When you look at the entire lifespan of Christmas trees, most of their negative environmental impacts trace back to transportation and disposal. “Shipping trees, say, from Oregon to Phoenix? There’s probably as much carbon involved there as there was in the whole production of that tree,” Cregg posits. That means buying from a local farmer, and keeping your dried-out spruce out of the regular trash on Jan. 1, will best minimize the annual harm.
Buying hyper-local isn’t feasible everywhere (there are growers in all 50 states, but most farms in the U.S. are clustered around Oregon, North Carolina, and Michigan), so the universal task for real tree devotees is finding a way to keep their greenery out of the landfill. Yard waste, which includes dead Christmas trees, makes up around 7% of what’s in U.S. trash heaps, where it burps methane, a planet-warming gas that’s 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide. When a tree winds up in the dump, its global-warming potential more than quadruples, according to estimates from Carbon Trust.
The good news is that Christmas trees make excellent mulch. Some municipalities even run annual programs—like New York City’s famous mulchfest—to dispose of trees, and a handful of Home Depot locations also offer seasonal tree recycling. The best first step is to check the website for your local waste-management or sanitation department and see if they have a specific day for organic or yard waste pickup, which can become compost. Or you can search “Christmas Tree” along with your zip code in Earth911’s directory to find a place that accepts dead conifers.
Best: A fake tree you give a second life
The upshot: The most sustainable thing is the thing that already exists. That’s as true of the refurbished laptop you wrapped up for a college-bound kiddo as it is for a fake tree whose live you extend.
Given that Americans snap up 10 million new faux trees every year, it’s beyond a safe assumption that you’ll be able to find a perfectly good—if not excellent—tree on the secondhand market. Even a passing search through thrift shops and online clearinghouses like Mercari and Facebook Marketplace surfaces a bumper crop of preloved pines this time of year, including a range of funky vintage options.
If you need a little inspo or help freshening up an older tree, we gathered some of the best advice on this Pinterest board.
Before you fire up that browser to hunt down a new-to-you tree, though, we’d be remiss if we didn’t also say the following: If you already have an artificial tree, you don’t need to do anything else. Get it out of storage again and trim that thing until the branches fall off.
Additional reporting by Corinne Iozzio.