Time to get rid of the tree and help a local charity

Tuesday 03 January 2017

A team of green-fingered volunteers are hitting the road this week to help you get rid of your Christmas tree in an eco-friendly way and raise some cash for a local charity.

The annual Christmas tree collection has raised over £200,000 in just over a decade for Jersey Hospice Care and with over 600 Islanders already signed up, the team look set to beat the £30,0000 they helped collect on their rounds last year.

Now in its twelfth year, the annual collection is a big part of the festive calendar, takes the burden off you lugging a large, heavy pine tree to the Island's recycling plant and helps ensure even more trees get recycled in the first place.

Department for Infrastructure's Recycling Manager Emma Richardson-Calladine said: "All of the trees collected will be shredded and composted to make a soil improver that goes back onto local land and gardens. This time of year is one of the highlights for our commercial composting facility as the smell of the Christmas trees is amazing!”

As well as the team of volunteers driving vans around the Island, the scheme is helped along by local garden centres, Jersey Post, TTS, Webreality and La Collette Green Waste as well as the lead sponsors, the Aztec Group.

The Group started sponsoring the scheme back in 2014 after Joanna Hewlett, the Aztec Group’s Head of Human Resources and a loyal Christmas tree collection volunteer, suggested they all get involved.

She said: “The scheme is a great way to pull the community together in a considerable fundraising effort and the Aztec Group’s support has been invaluable to the way in which it has developed over the past few years. All the funds go to a worthy cause and it has the added benefit of helping the environment too.”

This year the company's 'elves' planted about fifteen trees around their Jersey office at the beginning of December and got employees decorating them all to turn the office into a festive wonderland.

Jersey Hospice Care's Chief Executive Emelita Robbins said: “The Christmas Tree Collection and Recycling Scheme has done so well in the past and makes such a difference to the charity, it is a lovely expression of Christmas spirit on the Island. We hope that the same number of people, if not more, will take part by either allowing volunteers to help dispose of their tree for a small charitable exchange, or by volunteering themselves.”

You can register for your tree to be collected and recycled here. They'll be collected from local businesses on Tuesday 3 and Wednesday 4 January and from home addresses on Saturday 7 and Sunday 8 January.

To discover for yourself what makes Aztec Group the bright alternative