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Have a truly green Christmas

A Squamish company wants to make your Christmas truly "green." Carbonsync will deliver a live potted fir tree to your home, place it, then pick it up after Christmas and replant it, all the while keeping track of carbon emissions and savings.

 

A Squamish company wants to make your Christmas truly "green."

Carbonsync will deliver a live potted fir tree to your home, place it, then pick it up after Christmas and replant it, all the while keeping track of carbon emissions and savings.

"We have potted 100 six-foot Douglas firs from a farm where they normally sell cut trees," explained Brad Major, a certified arborist and Carbonsync's owner-operator.

"We are doing a complete carbon counting of the project so that would include our green house gas carbon footprint and I crunched all the numbers last night and we should be able to break even after the trees survive for one year."

Major is working with Trees Canada, a volunteer organization promoting the planting of trees to promote quality of life and other organizations to find places to replant the trees after Christmas.

Carbonsync will also be donating 10 per cent of the profit of the project to the Burns Bog Conservation Society.

The trees are expensive though, with a five- to seven-foot tree rental costing $125.99 including pick up and delivery.

Major acknowledges it's pricy to be green but he says it is expensive to dig a tree out of the ground, pot it properly, deliver it and pick it up too.

"They are expensive but we want to have 100 per cent transparency to see where they go and what our profits are and the carbon footprint of it," said Major.

Some of the trees will likely not survive said Major and there is a plan for those too.

"We will chip them and weigh them to see the carbon content of them as part of the project," he said.

"We are trying to fit it all into the ecology of the cycle."

Major said the company is about to formally launch the trees for sale. To get your Carbonsync tree go to www.carbonsync.ca.

"The fun thing for me is that you can chip them up and put them on a scale and figure out the carbon content of them and that carbon was sucked right out of the atmosphere and that is something you can actually see," said Major.

"It is the environment in front of you."