The holidays give us a great opportunity to flex our “sustainability muscles” like He-Man or Xena the Warrior Princess and we can start with doing right the predominant cultural centerpiece of the American living room, the Christmas tree.
My boss came to work Monday excited about her past weekend, having set up her synthetic tree. She has been using it for several seasons now, and she told me that if you use it 9 times or more, it’s impact on the world is less harsh than that of cutting down a real living tree each year. This got my mind wondering… Was this true? Is a re usable plastic tree more sustainable than a single use living tree? What is the best way to recycle both real and synthetic trees? I decided to do some research and report back. The following is what I discovered.
