12 Days of Underconsumption is a special series from one5c laying out everything you need to know to celebrate more sustainably.
12 Days of Underconsumption is a special series from one5c laying out everything you need to know to celebrate more sustainably.
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 is: It depends.
The first thing to understand is that real trees are not as bad as you 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. Most are farmed and take seven to eight years to mature and do help sequester some carbon while they’re alive. But the real point, Cregg says, is to think of a Christmas tree like a soybean or a tomato: a crop grown for a specific purpose.
But does that also mean that a real fir is superior to a fake one? Not necessarily. Depending on how you handle your seasonal greenery—and how long you hang on to it—a pretend pine might win out.
Good: A real, local tree—disposed of correctly
When you look at the entire lifespan of Christmas trees, most of their negative environmental impacts trace back to transportation and disposal. 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 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 typically becomes compost. Or you can search “Christmas Tree” along with your zip code in Earth911’s directory to find a place that accepts dead conifers.
Better: A fake tree you keep for years
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). (The ACTA does represent the artificial-tree industry, but its analyses are the most often-cited.) The thing to remember 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 all impacts—including the potential for smog and other pollutants in addition to greenhouse gases—many estimates, including ACTA’s, put breakeven at about five years. That’s perfectly doable when you consider that most folks keep fakies for 10 years or more.
Stretching out the lifespan 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.
Best: A fake tree you give a second life
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.
Updated 12/9/24: This post has been updated to clarify the factors included in the data used to compare the environmental impacts of real and fake trees, as well as to more clearly characterize the source of that data.