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Hey team, and welcome back to The Mess—holiday questions edition. Today, we’re tucking into a trio of yuletide queries, including a peek at the growing (😁) trend of Christmas tree rentals.
Got something on your mind? Shoot us your questions anytime at editors@one5c.com. —Corinne |
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I’ve been hearing a lot more about tree rental services this year. Are they a 'greener' option than a cut tree—or a fake one? |
Ah-hah! A plot twist in the annual Christmas tree debate. Rental services deliver a potted live tree to your home, then, once the season’s through, they pick it up and replant it. The Los Angeles–based Living Christmas Company, for instance, rents trees for up to seven years, and, once an evergreen has outgrown indoor use, they’ll find it a permanent home in a local community or reforestation project.
Right out of the gate, it’s a pretty safe assumption that rental is better than a fake free from a carbon perspective, Bert Cregg, a forestry professor at the University of Michigan, told one5c. Determining if it’s better than a cut tree, though, is a harder question to answer.
Making that kind of determination requires a head-to-head lifecycle assessment (LCA) to know for sure. LCAs look at the entire cradle-to-grave journey of an object. In the case of a tree, that includes everything from the fertilizer a farmer uses to schlepping trees to markets to how much carbon a composted conifer lets loose when it breaks down.
We couldn’t find an LCA for any of the tree-rental services we looked at, but when we asked Cregg, he said it’s probably safe to assume a borrowed spruce's initial footprint is similar to any other nursery evergreen that’s intended to be moved around and replanted. The best we can do to from there is make rough comparisons with an LCA for cut Christmas trees.
One of the biggest benefits when comparing a live rental to a cut tree is that it keeps the carbon the tree absorbed while it was growing locked away. Translation: It stops trees from landing in trash heaps and incinerators, where they cough out either methane or carbon, respectively. Nixing question marks around Christmas tree disposal is a big deal, because the way we dump our seasonal greenery can be one of the biggest ways a live-tree tradition contributes to human-caused warming.
Things get wonky, though, once you start to add up the impacts of hauling the tree back-and-forth year after year. Considering that trucking around cut Christmas trees can account for about one-third of their planet-warming potential, transportation could be a red flag on the rental game.
What’s that mean? “If people are interested in doing this, the thing they really want to focus on is finding something that's nearby,” Cregg says. “That’s probably the tipping point if you're going to focus on carbon as the measure.” Right now, tree rental services are only available in pockets of the U.S., so it’s really only an option if you can find one within a short drive.
If you have a lawn or some acreage, the other workaround is to buy a living tree that you can plant in the yard once the season’s through. “Rental is really kind of a take on that, and that’s been around for a while,” Cregg adds. |
Is it better to fly, drive, or take the train for my holiday travels? |
Plane, train, or automobile? It depends. There’s no hard-and-fast rule when it comes to what mode of transportation has the smallest impact on the planet, because the math shifts depending on how many people are traveling and over what distance. The closest thing we can come to a universal truth here is this: Pretty much nothing beats the bus.
If Greyhound isn’t super palatable to you (fair!), it’s possible to game out what’s next-best. A family of four making their regular holiday trip? Carpooling is king. On drives of any length, having more people in the car pulls down each individual's share of planet-warming emissions. According to an analysis from the Union of Concerned Scientists, flying never beats driving for groups of four or more. If only one or two people are making the journey, the train wins out at shorter distances, but a flight beats the train if the trip is longer than 1,000 miles.
There is an asterisk on that, though: In some regions of the U.S., one or two people taking the train is superior to a car or plane from an emissions POV at any distance. Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, which runs between Washington, D.C., and Boston, is the brightest green spot on the national rail map. That’s because it's one of the few lines equipped to run electric trains. Pretty much everywhere else the locomotives burn diesel. Passenger emissions per mile traveled along electric lines is 0.13 kilos; elsewhere it’s 0.28.
Does it stink to be locked into a transportation system that’s so dependent on cars? Absolutely. It makes us pretty nutty, to be perfectly honest. That’s why getting more people to take their road trips in EVs can be such a powerful and impactful move.
And, just so we’re clear: We’re not at all advocating you skip a train ride in favor of a plane if you’re inclined to do so. If you’re weighing riding the rails, it helps to think of the bigger picture and remember that a choo-choo can replace thousands of shorter car journeys, which isn’t something a plane can muster. A single train route can service hundreds of different combinations of origins and destinations; a plane only has Point A and Point B. |
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I know it’s more sustainable to give someone an ‘experience’ like concert tickets or a series of art classes, but something about it feels kinda lame. Do people really like this stuff? |
Dude, we totally get it: The sheer joy of tearing into a present feels nothing like opening up an envelope. But there’s real research to back up the idea that experiences make better gifts than stuff. Studies about this pop up all the time.
For example, one in the journal Frontiers in Psychology in 2024 found that people who got tickets to an experience or event tended to be happier and more grateful than those who received physical gifts. Experiential presents can also help the gifter and giftee feel more connected because they create an excuse to spend time together. Awwww.
That said, finding the just-right experiential gift takes time and thought. If you’re unsure where to start, a giftee’s hobbies can provide clutch clues. A dog lover might be tickled at the idea of taking their pup to agility classes; an avid hiker could get a lot of mileage out of a National Park annual pass; or someone with a green thumb could tap an American Horticultural Society membership to visit public gardens. (Check out all our best ideas here.)
There’s no such thing as a perfect gift, and an experience can be a dud as easily as a physical thing. But hey: At least unused concert tickets won’t clog up the landfill. |
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