Tuesday, December 11, 2012

What type of Christmas tree should I buy?

   It may have occured to you that growing a tree specifically to cut it down might be just a little bit wasteful. They're like any other crop, only they take many years to "ripen." On the other hand, plastic Christmas trees are, well, plastic. We're meant to be producing as little of that as possible, right? Petroleum is bad and so on? Can you even recycle a fake Christmas tree?
   These are kind of an odd questions to tackle, but with all the extra consumption going on around the holidays it's important to at least try to work them out. Fake trees are made from a plastic that cannot be recycled; their only pro is that you could potentially keep using them for the next few hundred Christmases, but in actuality people only keep them for an average of six. Real trees that are cut down have the pro of being compostable, but since they are grown in monocultures, that is large tracts of land devoted to, only one crop, they tend to guzzle a lot of pesticides and other resources and degrade the land as they grow. They do sell organic cut trees, which are an excellent option, though in my experience they're about twice as expensive.
   There is a fourth option, the one I went with this year. Just buy a living tree! When the holidays are up you can either plant it or keep it in the pot for next year. If you use it for more than two Christmases, it will be saving you money. And as a bonus, you'll never again have to deal with messy needles falling all over the place as your tree withers away before you. It's a win-win!

  Anyway, here are a couple more quick tips for lowering your impact this holiday season:
  •  Buy reusable decorations. Apparently, roughly two thirds of American household buy new decorations each year! That's over $7.5 billion spent and tons of waste produced. 
  • Buy greeting cards that are made from recycled material. This could make a bigger difference than you make think as statistically Americans send two billion holiday cards a year. 
  • Try to get presents with little or no packaging, and rather than wrapping them in paper present them in a reusable bag or basket. Americans produce an extra two billion pounds of garbage per week over the holidays, and most of it is wrapping paper. With a little care we can easily get that number down.
 That's all folks.  Happy holidays!