Based on the listed sales numbers it appears a majority of fake trees are a one-year deal (maybe two). You can’t sell 25m fake trees a year if people are keeping them for next year.
My Parents still have the same artificial tree from when I was a kid, it has lasted 30+ years.
Here in Australia I think Artificial Trees are the norm, I've never really thought about it before, Possibly because Christmas is in Middle of summer and real trees would be difficult to keep looking fresh.
I always felt a lot of cognitive dissonance around Christmas growing up all the songs and decorations are about snow and winter but the weather here is oppressively hot.
We stopped using our artificial tree because many of the branches are broken, probably from the weight of all the decorations. It too lasted over 30 years.
We have the same kind of disconnect around here (Brazil): all these people dressed as Santa Claus (heavy-looking winter clothing) in the middle of 40 degree Rio de Janeiro summer has always been an odd juxtaposition.
We had fake trees growing up. We had two over the entire time I lived with my parents. We have a fake tree in my house now. We bought it in 2007 before having kids and I expect that will be the only tree my kids will see. I can't imagine discarding a fake tree after less than 10 years, let alone 1 or 2.
I think a lot of these trees being disposed of has to do with the integrated lighting strings going out and folks not dealing with debugging/fixing them when a new tree is $200.
I'm hopeful that with the advent of LED lit trees reliability goes up and there is less early waste of perfectly good plastic with a few busted lightbulbs.
I wonder what percentage of that is businesses. E.g. all the fake trees in a shopping mall: Do they buy and trash them? Do they rent them from someone who stores them? I kinda doubt they store them themselves, but maybe?
