REAL VS. ARTIFICiAL There’s no real choice between artificial and the old-fashioned, grown-from-the-earth Christmas tree. True, the plastic kind are reusable. But the majority are made in Asian factories out of polyvinyl chloride, which contributes dioxin to the air during the manufacturing process and again if the tree is burned. Exposure to dioxins, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, can cause cancer and developmental and reproductive problems.
But most people only hang onto their plastic trees for five years before chucking them into the landfill, where they’ll remain for centuries, or worse, they are burned in an incinerator. They can’t generally be recycled. LOCAL VS. IMPORTED Real Christmas trees, on the other hand, provide wildlife habitat, protect against erosion, sequester carbon dioxide something we need in a warming world and even produce oxygen during the eight to nine years they grow before being cut and hauled to market.
They’re 100 per cent renewable and recyclable. City trucks collect them from the curb in January and they’re ground into mulch for our parks. To boot, they’re considered a profitable agricultural crop a rarity today, when Toronto garbage collectors earn more than double the income of an average Ontario farm worker, and when more and more farmland is being gobbled up by developers and urban sprawl.
Ontario’s Christmas tree industry is puny compared to Quebec’s and also overshadowed by both New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. According to Ross Gough of the Christmas Tree Farmers of Ontario, many of the trees stocking the yards of big box stores around Toronto are trucked in from there. Why help protect eastern farmland when our own is so threatened? Add Christmas trees to your Buy Local list, and if you are picking up one from a lot, make sure it’s from the Green Belt.