Christmas trees are bad for environment

"If your bank account is straining under the pressure of Christmas shopping, spare a thought for our environment."

Don Henry, of the Australian Conservation Foundation

Christmas is damaging the environment, says a new report by the Australian Conservation Foundation.

The report titled "The Hidden Cost of Christmas" calculated the environmental impact of spending on books, clothes, alcohol, electrical appliances and lollies during the festive season.

Every dollar Australians spend on new clothes as gifts consumes 20l of water and requires 3.4 m2 of land in the manufacturing process, it said.

Last Christmas, Australians spent US$1.1 billion on clothes, which required more than half a million hectares of land to produce, it said.

Water that would approximately fill 42,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools was used in the production of Christmas drinks last December -- most was used to grow barley for beer and grapes for wine.

"If your bank account is straining under the pressure of Christmas shopping, spare a thought for our environment," said Don Henry, the foundation's executive director.

"It's paying for our Christmas presents with water, land, air and resources. These costs are hidden in the products we buy."

The report said that gifts like DVD players and coffee makers generated 780,000 tonnes of greenhouse pollution, even before they were unwrapped and used. A third was due to fuel consumption during production.

Even a box of US$24 chocolates or lollies this Christmas, will consume 20kg of natural materials and 940l of water.

"We can all tread more lightly on the earth this Christmas by eating, drinking and giving gifts in moderation, and by giving gifts with a low environmental cost, such as vouchers for services, tickets to entertainment, mem-berships to gyms, museums or sports clubs, and donations to charities," said Henry.

One suggestion has been to grow more trees, which absorb carbon dioxide, the gas blamed for trapping heat. More trees mean more carbon dioxide removed from the air.

New computer simulations, however, indicate that establishing new forests across North America could provide a cooling effect for a few decades to a century, but that after that, they would lead to more warming.

"There's really no simple answer," said Ken Caldeira, a scientist at the Carnegie Institution Department of Global Ecology in Stanford, California, who presented the research at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union here. "At least in this calculation, there is predicted to be a net warming effect."

That is because tree leaves are darker than bare ground or the plants that have replaced the forests.

Earlier research had shown that the forests in polar regions -- much darker than the surrounding snow -- contribute a warming effect, and scientists still believe that tropical forests offer a cooling effect, both because of their absorption of carbon dioxide and because increased evaporation produces clouds that reflect sunlight back into space.