Three years ago, community churchgoers in Aurora, Ore. were shocked to see real Christmas trees adorning neighborhood homes. One priest told a local newspaper that people thought Christmas was threatening the nation's forests.
“People were confessing their sins against nature. The whole congregation said they sinned against the earth for having real Christmas trees,” said Joe Sharp, owner of nearby Yule Tree Farm. “There was a total lack of honorable information being provided to the consumer of what Christmas trees were about.”
Despite rising consciousness of global warming and the importance of sustainability, the Christmas tree industry still faces public misconceptions about the effect of real trees on the environment.
Christmas tree farms are good for the environment because trees are a renewable resource, and they are often grown on soil that cannot support other crops, said Rick Dungey, spokesperson for the National Christmas Tree Association.. Also, farms ensure that about 3.5 billion oxygen-emitting trees, rather than buildings, occupy the land in the U.S. at any given time.
During a focus group about artificial trees Dungey observed five years ago, one woman said she used a fake tree because she disapproved of cutting down forests. Later in the interview, when asked what the artificial tree company should improve, the same woman said the cardboard boxes holding the trees need to be thicker for easier storage, he said.
“People are so separated from agriculture and nature it dumbfounds me,” Dungey said.
Artificial trees are the least sustainable option, because most people throw them away after using them for only a few years, said Dungey. They are made of polyvinyl chloride, which takes millions of years to break down in a landfill, while real Christmas trees can be recycled, he said.
Real Trees Are Evergreen
To help show consumers that Christmas trees are actually earth-friendly, some farmers are seeking environmental certifications, like those from the Coalition of Environmentally Conscious Growers.
The coalition, which Sharp founded in 2006, is a group of four large-scale farmers based in Oregon. Members must follow certain standards related to soil and water conservation, pest management, biodiversity and fertilizers, Sharp said. All trees the Coalition farms produce carry a tag that lists why the tree is “Certified Environmentally Friendly.”
Tree farmers have been waiting for governments to start a certification process for years, said Mark Rohlfs, who owns Santa and Sons Christmas Trees in Philomath, Ore. Eventually, Rohlfs gave up on the government and joined Sharp in starting the coalition, which evaluates farm practices using an independent company, Freer Consulting Co. in Seattle.
“Farmers care about the land more than environmental critics give us credit for,” Rohlfs said.
After the farmers took on the task of setting green standards, Oregon’s state government began setting up its own certification program. The state version, however, does not include a plan for marketing tactics essential to educating the public.
Some consumers still think tree farmers harvest their pines in the forest by climbing them and chopping their tops off, Rohlfs said. He said his customers in Los Angeles have been relieved to see the environmentally friendly tags.
A Very Organic Christmas
Becoming green certified may be more difficult for smaller farms because the process requires an expensive audit, Rohlfs said. Justamere Tree Farms is one such small, local grower in western Massachusetts. Instead of subscribing to a more rigid standard of qualification offered by the coalition, Justamere is qualified as organic by Certified Naturally Grown.
Owner J.P. Welch said he and his wife do not use pesticides because they kill the helpful insects as well as the harmful ones, and the couple is afraid of contaminating the pond and brooks near their farm. To keep unwanted pests away, Welch started mixing types of trees instead of separating them, which fools the predatory insects.
Customers are not usually aware that most Christmas trees have been sprayed, and they seem to care more about buying locally than organic, Welch said.
“People are really catching on [to buying local], whether they’re doing it because they’re going to get a fresher tree, support the local economy or feel good about what they just did,” he said. “ We’re thrilled about it.”
The Coalition of Environmentally Conscious Growers does use pesticides, but only in the case of a pest outbreak, Rohlfs said.
Their method, widely used with other crops across the country, is called integrated pest management and balances using biological controls such as Welch’s with using chemicals.
“I’m not going to let insects take two weeks to destroy a crop I’ve been growing for eight years,” Rohlfs said.
Because pesticides are a significant expense, farmers will only use the smallest amount of chemicals necessary, Dungey said.
“When you scout your field and you have fungus in soil, you have two choices: let your trees die or do something to protect them,” he said.
Organic and certified green trees aside, all that matters is that consumers choose real trees over fake, said David Newman, chair of the Forest and Natural Resource Management department at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.
“The organic question is more made up than anything I can think of,” Newman said. “The amount of pesticides being used is very small.”
Repairing Last Year’s Damage
Artificial trees sure don’t have lives after Christmas. Across the country, real trees have been chipped into mulch, composted, turned into fuel and used to create new animal habitats. In Burlington, Vt., trees are chipped and turned into electricity or heat.
“It doesn’t generate that much, but the bigger thing is that methane doesn’t go into landfills,” said Mary Sullivan, spokesperson for the Burlington Electric Department.
Last year, Boston collected and composted 206 tons of trees, said Matt Bradley, head account clerk at the Boston Department of Pubic Works. The trees are collected for two weeks after Christmas with the regular trash pickup and recycled automatically.
On the coast of Alabama Gulf State Park, old Christmas trees help rebuild sand dunes, said C.J. Jarmon, manager of the park’s Nature Center. Residents drop off about 300 trees every Christmas, and volunteers dig trenches to lay the trees in the sand. The fine sand blows over the trees and begins building new dunes.
Volunteers also plant flowers with lots of roots, like Morning Glories, into the trees to help hold the sand in place. Dunes keep the water from creeping too far onto the shore, and the park on the island of Gulf Shores would completely wash away if tides became too high, Jarmon said.
“If the water comes in to erode the beach, we give them an offering,” she said. “Here are some trees; now, stop taking the sand!”
Christmas trees come just in time after hurricane season every year to restore some of the damage; they were especially useful after Hurricane Ivan in 2004. The state park only occupies 200 miles of the beach, but owners of other parts of the shore use the same method to rebuild dunes, Jarmon said. The trees also provide a safe hiding place for the endangered Alabama beach mouse, she said.
Other endangered species use Christmas trees as homes on Baker Lake near Chicago, where great blue herons, great egrets and black-crowned night herons have run out of natural nesting spots. The birds used to nest on an island in the middle of the lake, but the island’s trees died and the birds had no where else to go, said Chris Merenowicz of the Forest Preserve District of Cook County, Ill.
The district built metal structures onto the shores of the beach that holds about 100 leftover Christmas trees collected from Home Depot every year, said Merenowicz, assistant director for resource management. Volunteers cut holes in the trees so the birds can nest inside, safe from predators.
In several towns in northern California, Boy Scouts collect Christmas trees to help the Department of Water Resources build fish habitats in Lake Oroville. The lake fluctuates about 200 feet each year because of summer droughts, making the lake inhospitable for water vegetation that fish need to reproduce, said Eric See, an environmental scientist for the department.
The Scouts collect anywhere from 1,000 to 1,800 trees every Christmas, and they are all anchored to the bottom of the lake, See said. The trees protect large mouth bass spawning in the lake and reduce wave damage to the eggs, he said.
“There’s definitely been a movement within the counties and local waste management to minimize the amount of waste generated,” See said. “They’ve done a good job of keeping green waste out of landfills.”
Although farmers and consumers may take various approaches to issues like pesticides, Welch said the experts all agree that buying a real tree is a consumer’s more important consideration.
“There’s nothing but benefits from a real tree,” he said. “You’re improving air quality, employing local people and when the tree is used up, you can recycle it.”
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