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A real Christmas tree, sourced and farmed locally and buried in a landfill after the holidays, would remove carbon from the atmosphere.
Please do not do this.
Putting organic material into a landfill where it will decompose anaerobically (without oxygen) creates methane. This methane then leaks from the landfill, accelerating climate change.
There are SO many constructive things you can do with organic material. You can take a dead or dying tree, or one that is otherwise a poor fit for a particular location, and use it to make wood chips for mulching soil; biochar to sequester carbon and enrich compost when added to compost; building materials; firewood and more. All of these things sequester carbon and/or reduce climate emissions by reducing the use of fossil fuels.
Growing a healthy tree just to make some methane with it in a landfill is profane. Please don't send any organic material to a landfill, especially not healthy trees. Leave healthy trees alone unless they're causing trouble (such as by damaging a roof) and instead prioritize the use of dead/dying ones, or those that aren't appropriate for their spot (e.g. shading solar panels) or climate (e.g. trees that require irrigation).
I recently had some healthy trees removed because they were threatening the house. I asked the tree service what they do with the trees. They said they bring them to the landfill. I was shocked because this was during a time when lumber costs quadrupled. I would have expected them to be able to mill it and profit further. They offer the wood to a local artistic carpenter first (at no cost), but that person cannot keep up in the slightest so most of the wood goes to the landfill. I spoke to another carpenter who said elm is too rich in minerals and thus dullens cutting tools so they rejected my offer of free wood. Ultimately it ended up in the landfill.
You’ve inspired a question: considering methane is 25× more harmful than CO₂, is it actually less harmful to burn wood in a fireplace than to bury it at the risk that methane develops and gets released? I guess that comes down to the probability of the methane escaping.
They said they bring them to the landfill.
That's awful, creating tons and tons of methane - and they even have to pay for dumping. Just so stupid all around.
When I get some land I'll have a standing open invitation for select local arborists to come and dump truckloads of woodchips on my land whenever they want, for free.
is it actually less harmful to burn wood in a fireplace than to bury it at the risk that methane develops and gets released?
Yes, it's absolutely better to burn wood for heat in a modern fireplace. Doing so replaces a large amount of fossil fuels that would otherwise be burned to generate direct heat or electricity for electric heat. Although passive solar heating is by far the best method of home heating, modern fireplaces are vastly superior to anything that contribute to climate change. Since I assume your concern about fireplaces is about particulate emissions and air quality, I can happily say that modern fireplaces emit hundreds of times fewer particulates than ones from just a few decades ago. While considerable work has gone into improving fireplace design, one can't say the same about cleaning up our energy grids and climate emissions.
The tree service made this offer: they were willing to cut the wood into fireplace-sized segments and leave it in place. It would be on me to find someone who needs firewood and deal with the splitting. I didn’t find any takers. If I had, I would not have had control over whether it goes into a proper wood burning stove w/cadallitic converter. I suppose if it could be milled into pellets that would have made it easy to dump and likely to be used in a relatively clean stove.
But I guess getting it into pellets is the tricky part. If the high-mineral wood dullens cutting tools the cost of blades/bits/rasps would have to be factored in.
The tree service was unwilling to deliver the wood to a place of my choice. Either I keep the wood or if they haul it then they will only haul it to the dump (or their partnered artistic carpetener if that person wants it).
So to be clear, are you saying cutting down pine trees and burying them is good for climate?
And they are correct. A fast growing conifer (like all trees) is made out of carbon fixed from the atmosphere. When it dies and is allowed to rot, the carbon is released back into the atmosphere. A tree is, over its life, completely carbon neutral.
Cutting a tree and putting it in an anaerobic landfill where it cannot rot, removes carbon from the atmosphere. The tree farmer plants another fast growing tree in that spot and in a few years you repeat the process.
It is a form of carbon sequestration. Albeit a very slow and haphazard one. If you want to use trees as part of a climate strategy, this is what it looks like. Grow > cut > bury.
I’ve heard that young trees don’t gain much. One form of greenwashing is to plant trees, take credit for planting a tree, then not tending to it to ensure it’s established over the long term. The trees end up dying before they get big enough to pay off. Many of them also get cleared deliberately to repurpose the land (and why not when the carbon credits don’t involve a followup check?). So in the context of Christmas trees, aren’t they getting cut down quite early in their life for the purpose of fitting in living rooms?
BBC World Service keeps talking about Christmas trees today, and I just catch the end of the story but they say the farming is vastly non-organic.
Perhaps this is crazy talk, but would it make sense to cut the top ~1—2 meters off a quite large wild pine tree to use as a Christmas tree, cover the wound with tar, and let the rest of the tree live on?
There is very much a conservation of matter thing here that you have to consider. The dry weight of a tree, no matter age or size, is almost completely carbon fixed from atmospheric CO2.
The only thing that would matter for tree age is the rate of carbon fixation is probably not linear with age/size. I’m not sure how well studied that is for the specific pine/fir species that we use in this application.
Either way, even if you cut your grass and stored in an anaerobic env you would be doing some small amount of carbon sequestration.
Re: greenwashing, all trees are carbon neutral over the life of the tree. If they die in a year, neutral; if they life for a century, neutral. Planting trees is not a carbon solution. You either have to bury dead trees or stop digging up millennia old dead trees (and algae). Those are the only two options. Every thing else is just for show.
Surely that must be a quite unpopular view. There are so many tree planting efforts. If that’s a sham (i.e. not carbon negative as advertised), why isn’t this getting a big spotlight? Ecosia is advertising they plant trees proportional to the number of search queries they get. And people buy into that.
It sounds right in theory, but you have to consider the planting and transportation costs. Plants that grow for longer absorb more carbon, and the petrol cost associated with tractor tilling, planting, spraying pesticide and fertilizer are proportionally lower compared to the volume of carbon absorbed by growth. Claiming buried evergreen trees are carbon sinks ignores all of the carbon set-up costs associated with establishing the trees. I'd believe it if we made tannenbaum out of bamboo and algae, but I'd have to see more data to believe Christmas tree growth was a carbon sink.
Moving it from the tree farm to the city, store to home, home to waste collection, waste collection to landfill is another practical carbon release. Landfills are real-estate, also a limited resource. While material decays much more slowly, preserving carbon not the intention of landfills. Modern landfills do account for or encourage the release of decay gasses and burn them off or tap them for power. They release the carbon dioxide is slower than incinerators (the much more likely destination for used trees) but probably not on a slow enough scale to make a geological impact.
You are correct that tree growth is carbon neutral, and something additional must be done to prevent decay and sequester the carbon. Simply growing trees to maturity and then sequestering them as bio-char on-site is more likely to result in net sequestered carbon.
That’s really all the biochar people are on about. They just get to double dip by directly sequestering the carbon in the soil and there can be long term benefits to the soil too, properly done.