Victoria Vaughan, Straits Times 14 Dec 09;
Real Christmas trees on sale at Candy Floriculture in Thomson Road. More people in Singapore are using real trees rather than fake ones for their Christmas decorations. A plastic tree that is reused for three to five years will have lower carbon emissions than a real one. TNP FILE PHOTO -- ST PHOTO: DESMOND LIM
POP quiz: Which leaves a bigger carbon footprint, a real tree shipped from Norway, or a fake made in China?
The answer is the tree produced from plastic, which is made from fossil fuels.
But a plastic tree that is reused for three to five years will have lower carbon emissions than a real one, which is replaced yearly after travelling thousands of kilometres to Singapore.
This year, 12,000 Christmas fir trees travelled from their wintry homes in Northern Europe and the United States to Singapore homes, hotels and malls, where they will impart their woody fragrance.
This is a big leap from the average of 7,000 trees that were brought here each year over the last four years. And more people are hankering after the real thing.
Only a few are left at Ikea, which has been selling real Christmas trees since 1990. It imported 2,100 trees from Sweden and Denmark this year by sea in refrigerated containers. They cost $49 to $159, depending on size.
Deputy store manager Lars Svensson said: 'Christmas came early for Ikea Singapore with demand for the live Christmas trees exceeding expectations...Next year, we will boost our quantities to ensure we can meet the demand, which we expect to be even larger next year.'
Nurseries, such as Candy Floriculture and Far East Flora in Thomson Road, also report an increase in demand for real Christmas trees.
Since the early 1990s, both nurseries have sold about 1,000 real trees - sourced from the US - each year, and expect them to be sold out this time round.
Candy Floriculture director Sharon Goh said: 'More people appreciate a live tree now. They live in small units and don't have space to store an artificial tree. Also real trees give out a nice fragrance.'
The trees cost $40 to $14,000 - which was a record two years ago when a 12m-tall tree was supplied to Pan Pacific Hotel.
Miss Goh said that so far, no customer has expressed concern about the environmental impact of having a real Christmas tree. The plant and flower wholesaler
offers a service that collects used trees for recycling into mulch for planting.
Similarly, Ikea's customers can return trees for recycling into woodchucks and mulch, which are used in parks in the first two weeks of January.
Christmas trees adorn not only private homes - the biggest can be found in hotels and malls.
Of the nine hotels interviewed, three had a real Christmas tree, three had opted for artificial trees, and the rest had a combination of the two.
The real trees, 3m to 7.5m tall, are mostly sourced from the US, brought in by sea and will be recycled after the festive season.
The hotels that had artificial trees said they reused them.
A spokesman for the InterContinental Singapore said: 'Our hotel believes in recycling and being environmentally friendly. We reuse our Christmas tree every year, adding different decorations to jazz it up.'
At malls, efforts to come up with the most impressive Christmas trees often lead to bigger and bigger specimens.
This year, the tallest tree, at 83m, is at the Singapore Flyer. Its spokesman said it will recycle its Christmas decorations and materials for the Chinese New Year.
At VivoCity, a fake tree 'grows' a foot taller every year. Its main structure is made of mild steel and has been reused every year since 2007.
After several years of going without a tree, Tangs will put up a 10m-tall fake tree and use energy-saving fairy lights and baubles made of recycled materials.
The decorations will be reused next year after being touched up in a different colour, said a spokesman.
The tree's leaves are made of a reflective material to catch the sunlight and sparkle during the day, while reflecting light from the surrounding decorations at night. 'This way, we won't need that many fairy lights and need to switch them on only at night,' the spokesman added.
Recycling a real tree can reduce its carbon footprint to a point where owning one does not leave such a negative impact on the environment.
Otherwise, that real tree, though lovely, is hardly green at all when it has to be transported thousands of miles.
Dr Michael Quah, principal fellow at the Energy Studies Institute at the National University Singapore, estimates that if a 10kg tree in a forest in Norway were to be cut down, taken by rail to the capital Oslo, then flown to Singapore, where it is transported by road from Changi and then burned after use - it would emit 0.045 tonnes of carbon - equal to the carbon footprint of a person flying from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur.
If it is brought in by sea, the emission would be cut to a third - 0.016 tonnes.
If all Singapore's 12,000 Christmas trees went through the air freight cycle, they would emit about 550 tonnes of carbon dioxide, the footprint of six return trips to the moon by plane. If they were brought in by sea rather than by air, the carbon cost would shrink to about 200 tonnes.
Dr Quah said the biggest impact would come from burning the trees after use, with 0.015 tonnes of carbon being emitted per tree. 'If the tree is recycled, there would still be carbon emissions as it breaks down, but it would not be as great as burning it,' he said.
There are several places that compost trees into wood chips.
Dr David Kamaraj, a soil scientist at Kiat Lee Landscape and Building in Kranji Crescent, said there is an increase in such business after Christmas.
'Compost acts as a soil conditioner. It retains moisture, acts as mulching material, increases microbial load in soil, loosens the soil and supplies nutrients.'
So Christmas trees can be greener if you keep reusing an artificial tree for three to five years or recycle a real one brought to Singapore by sea, after the festive season is over.
Mr Samuel Wee, 30, who has been buying a real Christmas tree for the past four years, said he may stop.
'Four years ago, I read a Straits Times article on real trees and it spurred my interest. I like the way they look and smell, and they really add to the Christmas mood. When I host parties, it's a talking point,' he said.
The property agent said he became concerned about the environment this year.
'When I bought my tree from Far East Flora, I was told that they take about 10 years to grow. It's not just Singapore that uses Christmas trees, so there must be a lot of trees chopped down,' he said. 'If it becomes a global issue, I may stopping buying real trees for the greater good.'
Additional reporting by Ben Nadarajan
DREAMING OF A GREEN CHRISTMAS is a three-part weekly series leading up to Christmas which looks at how environmentally friendly some of the festive traditions are. In this second part, we look at both real and fake Christmas trees' carbon footprints. Next Monday, we look at how green greeting cards, wrapping paper and gifts can get.
Real Christmas Trees 'Greener' than Fake
Andrea Thompson, LiveScience.com Yahoo News 10 Dec 09;
It may not sound like "tree-hugging," but cutting down a real tree for Christmas is actually greener than going with the artificial kind, one scientist says.
"It is a little counterintuitive to people," said Clint Springer, a biologist at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia.
Because of concerns over deforestation around the world, many people naturally worry that buying a real tree might contribute to that problem, Springer says. But most Christmas trees for sale these days are grown not in the forest but on tree farms, for the express purpose of being cut.
Moreover, from a greenhouse gas perspective, real trees are "the obvious choice," Springer told LiveScience.
Live trees actively photosynthesize as they grow from saplings, which removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. After they have been cut and Christmas is over, they're usually chipped for mulch. As mulch, the bits of tree very slowly decompose, releasing carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. So in the end, a real Christmas tree is carbon neutral, putting the same amount of carbon dioxide back into the air as it took out (albeit much more slowly).
The tree farms that grew the trees also replant after the trees are cut.
Artificial trees, on the other hand, don't come out even in the carbon balance. Petroleum is used to make the plastics in the trees and lots of carbon dioxide-creating energy is required to make and transport them.
Because these trees just end up in landfills after a few years' use, "those greenhouse gases are lost forever," Springer said. "There's really no opportunity to recycle those."
Springer said he suspects that artificial trees have become more popular in recent years because they are more convenient.
Adding to incentives to "go real," this Christmas may also be economic concerns, as most artificial trees are produced in China, while real trees tend to be grown on local farms, Springer said.
Where can I find the greenest Christmas tree?
Plastic trees are coated in vinyl, but you still need to tread carefully through the forest of firs
Lucy Siegle The Observer 13 Dec 09;
I was amazed to hear of a potential shortage of normal Christmas trees this year – the unfavourable sterling/euro exchange rate means fewer conventional Scandinavian firs coming our way, apparently. But on planet eco we can hardly see the wood for the amount of "sustainable", "eco" and "charity" trees on offer. Their collective branches present every conceivable do-gooder scenario. There's the tree that goes on giving (www.christmasforest.co.uk, where for every tree you buy, a new tree will be planted by Tree Aid in Ethiopia); and the tree that goes on living (www.culturelabel.com, where an Eco Tree is delivered to your door in its own pot with a built-in "live root system", and is collected at the end of the festivities and replanted). There's also the certified organic tree (the Elveden estate, www.elveden.com, was the first to receive UKWAS certification from the Soil Association) and the tree that strikes a blow against weedy, mass-produced imports (www.realchristmastrees.co.uk hand-grow theirs in Shropshire and promise robust 10-footers and upwards).
Then there's the Austerity Tree. Traditionally, this would have meant a bunch of twigs sprayed silver and gold, but this year the Austerity Tree on sale at John Lewis has sold out (more are expected this week). Is it a better eco proposition than a real tree? Well, from what I can garner it is made in China and sprayed with fake plastic snow, but then it is reusable. This is the argument used to elevate plastic trees above real, but my opinion is that reusability is the only thing a plastic tree has going for it, given that it is likely to be made from polyvinyl chloride. And how much reuse actually goes on? Millions of plastic trees will surely spend this Christmas clogging up lofts and landfills.
Real trees are far from blameless. In common with other mass agricultural products they wreak havoc when produced without any sustainable forethought. By contrast, all of the greener real trees mentioned earlier have an ethical edge, whether it's because they tackle the amount of pesticide used in conventional Christmas tree farming, that too few trees are recycled; or because they give us trees with a smaller carbon footprint from a local source.
But too many green trees are still missing a crucial ethical point: 90% of the seed for Nordmann firs (5m of which are sold here each year) is derived from natural forests in Georgia. The cone pickers harvest by hand for scandalously low wages in equally scandalously dangerous conditions. In 2004 two workers were killed during the harvest, and since then statistics have been difficult to come by. The Danish grower, Bols Forstplanteskole, has brought in a fairtrade scheme which brings a better deal to the Georgian workers as well as safety equipment and regulations. Their trees, on sale through www.fairwindonline.com, are grown from fairly traded seed. Admittedly they represent another import, but this year they should get the gold star.
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