Daily Mail

...but council tells residents to buy a polluting Christmas tree

- By David Churchill

A CITY council is under fire for telling residents to buy fake rather than real Christmas trees. Experts pointed out that artificial trees can have up to ten times the carbon footprint of real ones and are mostly non-recyclable when families decide to get rid of them.

They also said thousands of jobs were created by selling real trees.

The advice was published in Portsmouth City Council’s quarterly magazine.

The leader of the council admitted the writer of the article was probably ‘thinking about mitigating the cost of council recycling’ and had gone too far. The Carbon Trust says the carbon footprint of a real two-metre Christmas tree is about 16kg of carbon dioxide if it goes to landfill.

But this can be reduced by 0 per cent by replanting or it being made into chips to spread on a garden. An artificial tree of the same size has a footprint of around 40kg of carbon dioxide and needs to be used for ten years to keep its environmen­tal impact lower than a real one.

The British Christmas Tree Growers Associatio­n said around seven million are sold every year, together worth £200million.

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United Kingdom