Heya,
I hope you are all having a wonderful Monday, just two more weeks until Christmas
🎉
I am here to settle something I have seen floating around social media these past few weeks,
C’mere to me…
Real vs Fake 🎄
The Christmas Tree Dispute
All too often I have seen people on social media calling out real trees as being ‘anti-environmental’…
The naive opinion going around is that cutting down trees is bad and we should all be buying artificial ones to last.
At a glance this seems sensible, but please don’t take things at face value.
Firstly, it is important to add that, in an ideal world, the practice of having a Christmas tree as a whole is not environmentally friendly. fullstop.
However, it is a tradition that won’t (nor shouldn’t in my opinion) change and when done right is barely a blip on your carbon footprint.
Real Christmas trees are farmed, meaning as soon as they are cut down they are replanted for the next year, thereby they are sustainable.
Yes, trees are cut down but this is not deforestation, the land is not being stripped for urban development or repurposed for an awful palm oil plantation.
The trees are also not being burned, like in the Amazon, so they are not releasing copious amounts of carbon into the air and simultaneously killing all the wildlife in the area.
In fact, by supporting the ‘real’ tree economy, you are encouraging farmers to give up large plots of land to plant trees, instead of using it for another more lucrative crop.
Therefore, for the entire year, there are fields of trees absorbing carbon dioxide and replenishing our air with oxygen.
The trees actually absorb even more carbon into the soil and roots, which will remain there when they are chopped.
As they spend the year growing they also provide a habitat for wildlife.
The only caveat to a real tree is that you must recycle it. The good news, however, is that most people do as councils will take them for free and use them for wood chippings etc. Again this is good for the environment and none of the carbon stored in the wood is burned off.
In fact, even if you did burn the real tree and release all the harmful carbon it had absorbed, its net carbon footprint would still be 10x less than a faux tree…
Faux trees seem like a good idea on the face of them but frankly, they’re not…
In order to make them ‘worth it’, you must keep them for at least 10 years and beyond. However, lots of them break or people move and can’t take them. The reality is that they don’t last the time they should, even if you were willing to stick it out.
The majority of plastic trees are manufactured using petrochemicals that are not only awful for the environment but cannot be recycled…
…which surely defeats the entire purpose of a plastic tree.
Lastly, trees are not small objects, even the ones you assemble, so say you got one shipped from China, it will have been made using electricity from non-renewable sources and will have already assumed a massive carbon footprint in getting across the world to you.
“The Carbon Trust estimates that a 2 metre artificial tree has a carbon footprint around 40kg CO2e, more than twice that of a real tree that ends its life in landfill, and more than ten times that of real trees that are burnt.”
So if you have an artificial tree at home you would need to re-use it for at least 10 Christmases to keep its environmental impact lower than that of a real tree.”
(read more - The Carbon Trust)
In conclusion, get a real tree.
The best-case situation (although much harder to achieve) is to have a potted tree, including the roots and soil.
This way the tree can be replanted after Christmas and reused the following year, and therefore, excluding what you undertake to move it around, has virtually no carbon footprint whatsoever.
I hope that makes sense, I would love to hear your opinions! ↩️
Photos I saved 📷
Think 🤔
It would serve me better if they put shopping carts in the middle of the store where my pride realises I have too much shit to carry.
Profound 🤯🌊
Tic Tacs are almost pure sugar, but get away with calling themselves sugar free because united states regulations say it has to have less than a gram of sugar to be sugar free, and Tic Tacs are less than a gram.
That’s all for now 🤙🏽
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Thank you,
Guy