The Christmas tree debate- Real or fake? Is one better than the other?

Ava and Bianca in year 11 consider whether a real tree is better than a fake one. Or perhaps it only matters when it comes to your use of them.

With the Christmas season finally here, we must answer one question as those who celebrate the holiday deck their halls with boughs of holly.

Can Christmas trees be sustainable and are real trees any better than fake plastic ones?

Real trees are the traditional choice to decorate your home. They look effortlessly beautiful and best of all they fill your house with the scent of pine and evergreen. However, on average in 2017, 15,094,678 trees were cut down for Christmas festivities solely in the USA. I’m sure you can see how impactful this issue is.

Trees act as one of the World’s main carbon sinks, without them there is no doubt that the enhanced greenhouse effect would thrive, boosting global warming to a much larger threat than it already is. One could suggest that we should plant one tree for everyone taken down, this would be able to keep up with the high demand for natural trees while still ensuring that our planet is safe, however there is a major flaw with this suggestion. These pine trees take up to 9-25 years to become healthy and tall enough to be used therefore the demand will still not be able to be reached.

On the other hand, the mass cutting down of trees does have some positive aspects. This could create many jobs for locals.

Additionally, trees biodegrade, returning to the ecosystem in a way. Finally, trees can be regrown and so are a renewable resource, unlike alternatives like plastic.

 

One may argue that plastic trees could potentially be better than real trees. Surely this can’t even be considered as a reasonable argument? We all know that plastic takes hundreds of years to decompose. It pollutes oceans and is just generally never found in the same sentence as the word ‘sustainable’.

However, one could suggest that real trees, like all living things, eventually die. And so, they need to be replaced every year. Fake trees do not die and so can be used year after year.

Even if some hundred years down the line my family have not held on to our plastic Christmas tree as an heirloom, it still would have seen many years of service. 

Surely this places plastic trees into a different category than plastic bottles. Like furniture, they too could end up in a landfill in the future. But, having seen many years of use, potentially it would not be such a waste. It is unlike current constant consumption of plastic which cannot be reused like a Christmas tree can.

 

Whether you have a Christmas tree, plastic tree or no tree at all up in your house, don’t let us convince you of decorating your house one way or the other. 

But if you have a real tree, the government website implores you to recycle or replant your tree. 

And if you have a plastic/fake tree, don’t feel guilty! But as with anything we consume, keep in mind you can get a lot of life out of the things you already have. Considering how much we are consuming already, less can so often be more.