In the aftermath of Christmas, a great many trees will be burned or sent to landfill. I blogged earlier in the season about alternatives to cut trees (still better than plastic trees). However, we’re now at the point where you’ll be thinking about what to do with the tree, if you have one.
If you don’t have a tree, well done! Please feel virtuous and easy of conscience at this point because you’ve already done the most environmentally responsible thing you could do on this score.
If you are in the UK, your local authority may well have a tree collection point for chipping and deployment – chipped trees can be used to help maintain paths, and this kind of re-use reduces their impact.
In some areas, charities are collecting trees for a donation, and then recycling them as chippings.
Find a responsible way of dealing with your dead tree. Don’t send it to landfill.
And really, Pagans, if you’ve killed a tree to celebrate midwinter, you might want to have a think about this.
December 27th, 2018 at 4:33 pm
I am pretty happy with my city when it comes to this issue. Ideally, they might consider banning single use trees as they have done with single use plastic bags (haha) but in the meanwhile they do collect the trees, chip them and give the material away to community gardens and parks. My community garden has benefited enormously from this generosity. At the same time, is this not kind of horrifying? Dedicating so much land to grow the trees, trucking them to urban centres, where more fossil fuels are used to take them to homes, then trucking the remains to the recycling centre and then using power tools to chip them. Then trucking AGAIN out to parks and gardens. This is madness.
December 28th, 2018 at 8:00 am
it is all mad, but that does sound like a solution of sorts.
December 27th, 2018 at 5:37 pm
We seldom get a cut tree; when we do it is most often a fir sapling growing where it cannot/should not/will be chopped and chipped by county anyhow place. We do have an artificial tree that we reuse, and sometimes we merely use metal wreath rings with lights – we hang them horizontally and hang ornaments on them high out of cat reach! We also buy potted live trees once in a decade to replant somewhere on the yard.
It is not disposal of trees that bothers me – I mulch with needles, chop and use trunk in fireplace. It is the endless water and fertilizers used to grow the “for sale” trees that seem most damaging to me.
December 28th, 2018 at 7:59 am
That’s a good set of approaches, and yes, I assume on the growth impact front, that will vary depending on where they are grown…
December 28th, 2018 at 4:56 pm
I live in Washington state – they grow a lot of the trees here!