Is a fake Christmas tree the 'green' choice?

By Marilyn Lewis

Which is "greener," an artificial Christmas tree or a real one?

Fir flew (so to speak) last year when British organic gardening guru Bob Flowerdew, author of "Bob Flowerdew's Organic Bible: Successful Gardening the Natural Way," announced he was buying a fake Christmas tree to save the forests. His defection from the ranks of live-tree advocates was testament to conflicting gospels on what exactly constitutes an environmentally friendly tree.

The Flowerdew faction is small but earnest. The logic: Manufacturing and shipping a plastic tree emits a small amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but just once. A tree left in the ground removes many times that amount, year after year.

Doesn't plastic's everlasting nature, they ask, make it the least-awful alternative? Because it lasts and lasts, a plastic tree could, in theory, spare more live trees every year it is used. Maybe that would reserve agricultural land for food -- or spare the environment from pesticides, herbicides and erosion.

No forests fall

The major reason the Flowerdew faction is small, however, is that the plastic-is-green rationale has more holes than a watering can. If forests are falling, it's not because of Christmas trees, points out Gary Chastagner, a Washington State University professor of plant pathology who specializes in Christmas-tree diseases and post-harvest quality.

"The notion that people are going out in large numbers and harvesting trees out of forests is not correct," Chastagner says. "These plants we are talking about -- Christmas trees, wreaths, boughs, cut flowers -- they are grown as crops," Chastagner says, not swiped from Mother Nature.

In fact, the market for Christmas trees means millions are planted each year, each "sequestering" by expert estimates, anywhere from 40 to 300 pounds of carbon dioxide a year.

So, by buying a real tree, you're saving the Earth, just a little, as well as sustaining what many would call the green heart and soul of Christmas. "They were originally put up to show life in the dead of winter," says Patrick Downey, a Christmas-tree grower in Sherbrooke, Quebec. "Putting up a plastic tree has no meaning whatsoever."

• Talk back: How much would you pay for a Christmas tree?

The industry is "predominately family farms that are supporting rural communities," at least in his state, says Jeff Owen, a Christmas-tree extension specialist at North Carolina State University. Christmas-tree farms, he says, are restoring wildlife -- rodents, songbirds, foxes, wild turkeys, birds of prey, bobcats, deer and -- it is rumored -- mountain lions. "Some of these counties, the quail had disappeared a generation ago. We've started to see quail coming back where they had disappeared because of habitat loss."

Credentials

Adding to their green credentials, live trees are often recycled. In North Carolina, discarded Christmas trees are tied to sand dunes to trap sand and slow erosion. They're bundled and sunk into lakes to make a habitat where fingerlings can hide from big predators. Cities and towns around the country recycle trees after Christmas by grinding them into garden mulch that they sell -- or give -- back to the folks who discarded the trees in the first place.

At the same time, live trees clean up air pollution. They suck carbon dioxide -- a huge contributor to global warming and respiratory disease -- out of the air and turn it into wood. The bigger the tree, the more carbon dioxide the tree scrubs from the atmosphere and the more oxygen it returns.

"For every tree we harvest, we replant," says Joe Sharp, owner of Yule Tree Farm in Oregon, the biggest Christmas-tree-producing state. Last summer Sharp and another big Oregon grower started the Coalition of Environmentally-Conscious Growers, to certify sustainably grown trees. But it's still hard to find their labels.

The problem with plastic

If you're thinking you're keeping a tree alive by hanging on to an artificial tree for nine or 10 years, don't pat yourself on the back just yet. Once you're sick of the plastic tree, Chastagner says, it'll live on in a landfill for centuries. Not eternal, perhaps, but from the American perspective, darned close.

Plastic trees also can cause more-immediate health problems. After just a week indoors, many artificial trees shed a dry dust containing lead, a powerful neurotoxin, the University of North Carolina's late environmental studies director, Richard Maas, found in his research

"It would still in many usage scenarios expose a young child to enough lead to knock a couple of IQ points off that child's intellectual ability," Maas told WSBTV in Atlanta in 2005.

Continued: Green Christmas tips

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