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Comment by silexia | Hacker News Reader

I run a Christmas tree farm at a small scale. I wonder if real Christmas trees are actually worse for the environment than fake trees as many real Christmas trees are burned rather than sent to a landfill?

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In Houston, Christmas trees are collected, taken down to Galveston ~50 miles away, and piled on beaches to serve as anchors for sand dunes, which is good for the shoreline. As noted elsewhere in this subthread, the carbon trapped in the trees takes years to be released into the atmosphere through the decay of the wood and needles.

As I was tossing my dead tree onto the disposal pile a few years ago, a couple other guys were gathering trees from the pile. I asked them what they did with the trees, and they said they put them at the bottom of their pond. They're great for creating a fish habitat, apparently.

Does it really make a difference to burn wood than to throw it away? I guess that after decomposition of the wood, all its carbon goes back to the atmosphere. It is just slower than if you burned it.

The biosphere is a closed cycle, we cannot probably use it to store carbon away by means of its own mechanism. Main problem is that we are adding new fossil carbon into it every day.

I've heard the opposite for global warming - burial is excellent for carbon capture (delays carbon release for a long time), burning is awful (releases carbon into the atmosphere instantly).

Interesting, it makes sense. Do you know what are the involved timescales here? How long before the buried wood is decomposed and has released most of its carbon back? Is it 50 years or 5000? Maybe it depends a lot on the type of soil?

EDIT: as the sibling comment observes, burning the tree cannot be "awful", as all the carbon from that tree came from the atmosphere. Growing and burning a tree is the epitome of carbon-neutral thing to do. Now, burying a tree may have a positive (non-neutral) effect.

It really depends on the local conditions. A log on the surface, in an area with things that will eat it (e.g. fungi, bacteria, termites, and other decomposers) will fairly readily give up its carbon.

If it gets covered, and spends time in a cold, anaerobic environment, there will be nothing to return it to the atmosphere. Decomposition can eventually stall out entirely, allowing it (given enough time and compression) to form coal or oil.

I'm very interested in wood gas pyrolosis, a process that pulls burnable fuel from wood and produces almost pure carbon as a byproduct. The gas could be used to generate electricity or heat, and the carbon could be buried in old mines. I suspect the economics just aren't there for it yet, (or the process doesn't scale to the numbers we'd need for large scale de-carbonization).

If you're buying a tree that would have otherwise not been grown (such as if buying Christmas trees wasn't a thing and that land was used for something else instead), I'm not sure it's so bad though. That carbon came from the atmosphere over the last 10-15 years, so putting it back is "even" within a child's lifetime.

According to a Google search, a tree takes 7-10 years. So you were on hacker news while that carbon was in the atmosphere. Puts it into perspective

Based on the listed sales numbers it appears a majority of fake trees are a one-year deal (maybe two). You can’t sell 25m fake trees a year if people are keeping them for next year.

Our fake tree is 30 years old, and made in Canada. We’re probably an outlier.

We had fake trees growing up. We had two over the entire time I lived with my parents. We have a fake tree in my house now. We bought it in 2007 before having kids and I expect that will be the only tree my kids will see. I can't imagine discarding a fake tree after less than 10 years, let alone 1 or 2.

I think a lot of these trees being disposed of has to do with the integrated lighting strings going out and folks not dealing with debugging/fixing them when a new tree is $200.

I'm hopeful that with the advent of LED lit trees reliability goes up and there is less early waste of perfectly good plastic with a few busted lightbulbs.

We just bought a fake tree with LED lights and I fully expect to be moving it into my 2yo’s first apartment.

I wonder what percentage of that is businesses. E.g. all the fake trees in a shopping mall: Do they buy and trash them? Do they rent them from someone who stores them? I kinda doubt they store them themselves, but maybe?

My Parents still have the same artificial tree from when I was a kid, it has lasted 30+ years.

Here in Australia I think Artificial Trees are the norm, I've never really thought about it before, Possibly because Christmas is in Middle of summer and real trees would be difficult to keep looking fresh.

I always felt a lot of cognitive dissonance around Christmas growing up all the songs and decorations are about snow and winter but the weather here is oppressively hot.

We stopped using our artificial tree because many of the branches are broken, probably from the weight of all the decorations. It too lasted over 30 years.

We have the same kind of disconnect around here (Brazil): all these people dressed as Santa Claus (heavy-looking winter clothing) in the middle of 40 degree Rio de Janeiro summer has always been an odd juxtaposition.

Here in south Louisiana there is a special collection of Christmas trees and they are used in the fight to preserve our wetlands.

Article from last year: https://www.nola.com/gambit/article_5ab7222e-2e60-11ea-a845-....

Around here (NYC) the Sanitation Department collects them and turns them into mulch for the parks. It's a great way to recycle them without burning.

The trees absorb carbon as they grow, which is emitted when they are burned. Plastic trees, by contrast, will sit in landfill forever.

Real trees have 10 years to filter out their own carbon, so I find that hard to imagine.

Where do you live that does that? In my area, students and Boy Scout troops do fundraisers where they come around and pick up the trees. They take the trees to landscaping suppliers, who in turn them through a wood chipper to make mulch.

The parks department in our town always threw a bunch of old christmas trees in the local lakes, since submerged trees make good shelter for young fish, tadpoles, etc.

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