Reuse, reuse, reuse. Getting the most from your purchases and avoiding the bins at all costs: that’s the official line when it comes to keeping cool and staying the right side of the green lobby, right?
Well, when it comes to Christmas trees – that perennial mainstay of the living room during the festive period – it just doesn’t work out that way.
Sure, you can buy a plastic tree that will go on being used for five years or so. Like a mad aunt, you can wheel it out of the loft once a year, plonk it in front of Noel Edmonds’ Deal or No Deal Christmas Special and keep complaining about the musty smell. But like so many aunts these days, it’s going to end up buried once the spine starts to sag a bit.
That’s the trouble, you see. In landfill, a PVC Christmas tree will take hundreds of years to break down. When it does, it just transforms into toxic chemicals that slowly leach in to the soil. So the impact is pretty high: and don’t forget it’s probably been shipped from China in the first place. In terms of ‘tree miles’, it suddenly becomes quite absurd.
It’s not like we have a tree crisis here in the UK. Trees you buy from British growers are all farmed, not cut from existing forests: by buying them you’re encouraging more trees to get planted next year.
The smart way get a greener tree is to visit www.christmastree.org.uk. It’s the site of the British Christmas Tree Growers Association, and they’ve got a searchable database of the best tree farmers all round the country, so you won’t even need to drive far to pick one up.
With around 5 million trees sold in Britain every Christmas, equal to 9000 tonnes of waste, it’s just as important to think about what you do with a tree after the in-laws have drifted off home and left you to pick up the pieces.
www.letsrecycle.com has the phone number and email address of every recycling officer in the country: most now organise a service to get your tree chipped, which often ends up as compost for local parks. There’s an even easier postcode-searchable way of doing this at www.recyclenow.com too.
Of course, if you buy a tree that’s got roots already, you might even try planting it out in the garden.
Having tried this myself several times, I can tell you that the normal result is a seven-foot tall brown bog-brush making your back yard look like the khazi of the Gods. Apparently, it’s all down to ‘hardening off’ your plant first: keeping it cool, exposing it slowly to the outdoors to acclimatise to the winter weather. How would you feel if someone pulled you out of your warm boots and plonked you in the frosty soil? Your best bet is to take words of wisdom from the experts: http://www.bbc.co.uk/gardening/plants/plantprofile_xmastree.shtml has some brilliant tips to help your precious tree survive the move from cosy fireside to savage January garden.
If all else fails, have you considered getting your mad aunt out of the loft and decking her out in tinsel and lights? It may sound unorthodox, but it’s a brilliant way to entertain the kids by Boxing Day.
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