120 million trees are cut down every Christmas across the world, leading to large scale deforestation and CO2 release
An average 2 metre natural Christmas tree produces a carbon footprint of around 16kg of CO2. While the plastic one has a carbon footprint measuring at around 40kg of CO2.
This means a total of 120 million trees that are cut every Christmas result in over 2-3 billion Kgs of Carbon Footprint.
As per latest records, Great Britain consumes about 8 million trees annually, while in the United States between 35 and 40 million trees are sold during the Christmas season.
Although some countries like US and UK produce Christmas trees purposely for the festival, most of the countries don’t which not only leads to increasing Carbon footprint but is a source of pollution as there has been an exponential rise in ‘fake’ plastic trees which are imported to most of the countries from China.
Other European countries in total consume another 50 million trees while Australia over 5-6 million. The other countries including Latin America, Canada, Russia and other Asian countries add up to another 40 million.
Despite varying demands every other year, the severe depletion of top layer of soil to deforestation of Pine and Fir trees along with the post-festival burning of these trees rather contributes to increasing climate change.
For a change, the people should rather opt to planting trees every Christmas instead of cutting them down.