Is a real tree more sustainable than an artificial one?

Real Trees

Production

When a live Christmas tree is going through its' growing cycle, it is actively taking CO₂ out of the atmosphere. Each tree that's grown is planted on farms that plant between 800-1,200 trees per acre. In Michigan alone there are 37,000 acres of Christmas trees growing at any given moment; do some quick math and you can see that 29.6 million trees are growing in the Great Lakes state alone.

For the United States as a whole, there are approximately 350,000 acres dedicated to growing Christmas trees. This means that there are 280 million trees growing on farms across the country.

According to carbonpirates, each young tree under the age of 10 will absorb and store thirteen pounds of carbon for each year that it grows. Applying this figure to the total number of Christmas trees growing at any given moment in the United States, you'll find that Christmas tree farming takes 3.6 billion pounds (1.63 megatons) of carbon out of the atmosphere each year.

This means that the Christmas tree industry in the United States alone completely offsets the carbon footprint from the countries of Greenland, Dominica, The British Virgin Islands, and Antigua & Barbuda -with some carbon sequestration to spare.¹

Shipping

Each tree takes a unique path being transported from a field to your living room; transportation is the leading cause for fossil fuel emissions. That being said; the most sustainable option for purchasing a tree is to ride a bike to a local forest and cut your tree down with a hand saw. Good exercise? Yes. Realistic? Not really. Convenient? Definitely not.

So, the second best alternative is to visit a local choose- and-cut tree farm. The shorter drive will ensure that less carbon is emitted from your automobile and less carbon is emitted from the possible transportation of your tree from a separate field to the tree lot.

However, what happens if you're not close to a choose-and-cut tree lot? That's where we come in. At Packaged Pines, we ship from one central location in order to both limit emissions and cut out unnecessary short haul shipping complications. Also, we only ship through intermediaries that are committed to sustainable practices.

In addition to this, we've partnered with OneTreePlanted OneTreePlanted allows us to effectively offset our carbon footprint that we incur through any of our growing or shipping processes. When you purchase a tree from Packaged Pines, our farmers will plant between 1 to 3 trees to replenish and grow the size of our fields; but with OneTreePlanted, an additional tree will be planted for each purchase. These trees are planted in areas all across the globe where over-logging and deforestation has taken place.

This insures that your decision to purchase a real tree only has a positive impact on our atmosphere.