This is probably the best use of Christmas trees (though it’s up for debate whether it’s a good idea to cut down spruce trees to begin with).
Side note: it was hard to find this story on a website that’s not exclusive access or enshitified. Even the company who built the turbine (#Modvion) has a tor-hostile website themselves.
According to the BBC Newsroom they use glue instead of bolts to hold it together.
Almost all trees that are cut down for Christmas were farmed specifically for that purpose. People have a gut reaction when they hear about cutting down trees, but trees are a renewable resource especially conifers that tend to be fast growing.
It would be nice if we could improve on gut reactions and sort out how much (if any) CO₂ is accumulated by spruce trees at the various points of maturity. Ideally the trees would only be cleared at the point where their CO₂ absorption rate tanks (which may not necessarily be when the tree would look nice in a living room) – assuming there is such a stage in its life.
Unless you’re turning it into charcoal and burying it deep under ground or allowing it to rot in a place that will be permanently banned from being tilled it’s 6 vs 1/2 dozen
Even when trees die they take years to decompose, and not all of the CO2 captured by a tree will be rereleased as CO2, as the tree is decomposing the organisms consumeing the trees will incorporate some of the carbon into themselves, approximately 4%of the tree’s weight.
Sounds so sustainable, and we can see it is also because everyone has homes food and nature is healing, and that the planet isn’t rapidly transforming into a destructive hypercapitalistic hell prison which is great news for the future of mankind