Shrewsbury school invests in composting machinery

Local private sector Shrewsbury school are demonstrating that being green with your waste can save companies money as well as protect the environment. 

With a reputation for sporting excellence their one hundred acre site boasts nine full-size grass pitches.  As you can imagine with daily maintenance they produce literally hundreds of tonnes of grass clippings & general green waste each year.

To help manage this waste more cost-effectively they have invested in a Seko Green Series Samurai 5 from local firm Harry West which can shred and mix all their compostable materials.  Previously it all had to be taken by tractor and trailer to local composting sites as a waste material which resulted in significant costs in terms of transport and gate fees.  The machine has also resulted in huge savings of staff time as well as creating a fabulous product to use on their flower beds or put back to good use for top dressing their sports pitches!  They are even thinking about bagging it up and selling it to local people.

All in all, the school reckons it’s now saving them about £25,000 each year compared to when they used to remove all the waste from site. The fact that it will also save on the cost of buying in compost and topdressing is another major advantage.  The investment in the new machine will have paid back the initial investment in less than a year.   It just goes to show that recycling your waste doesn’t have to cost the earth.  

Agricultural waste

Waste from farms is not municipal waste and so it is not dealt with by the local Council. Farmers need to make their own private commercial arrangements to deal with the waste they produce from their business activities.  This type of waste is regulated by the Environment Agency and you can contact them on 08708 506506 for guidance. This page provides some advice on dealing with waste from farms. Reducing waste from farms is not only good for the environment but makes economic sense too as it may improve your businesses efficiency. For more information please read the attached guidance document on farm waste or follow the link to DEFRA's webpage on farm waste minimisation.

Agricultural waste regulations

Since 2006 the new agricultural waste regulations affect whether or not you can burn, bury, store, use your waste on the farm or send it elsewhere. You also have to remember your Duty of Care when storing or passing your waste to someone else. The idea is to protect the environment and encourage more waste to be reused and recycled.

Are manure and slurries waste?

A recent court decision decreed that manures and slurries are not waste when used as a fertiliser on agricultural premises. However, other legal controls such as the Nitrate Vulnerable Zone Action Programme and Groundwater Regulations still need to be complied with.

What can you do with your waste?

There are five basic options: -

1) You can store waste for up to 12 months as long as it is stored securely, so it cannot escape from your control – such as become windblown or leak into nearby streams.

2) Take the waste to a recovery or disposal site yourself.

3) Give the waste to someone else. Most local waste carriers advertise in the local telephone directories.

4) Obtain a Waste Management Licence (WML) or a Pollution Prevention and Control (PPC) Permit. The Environment Agency warns that this is not for farmers who want to continue to operate a farm dump/tip as this will cost tens of thousands of pounds and is not a cost-effective option. It is only for people who are seriously thinking about diversifying into professional waste management activities.

5) Register licence exemptions – most farms need to register one or more exemptions.

What are the exemptions?

There are 21 available exemptions from the regulations. The main ones are listed below:

• Using waste paper as animal bedding.

• Using tyres on a silage clamp.

• Chipping logs and branches from cutting down trees and hedges, and shredding plant material.

• Clearing mud and debris (dredgings) from water-courses such as streams and ditches and depositing it along their banks.

• Using a compactor bin to crush waste, such as baling waste plastic silage wrap, shredding paper packaging, crushing empty containers, and cleaning pesticide containers.

• Burning naturally occurring plant matter, including logs and branches from fallen or chopped down trees, untreated timber from fence mending, hedge trimmings, leaves and bark.

• Disposal of plant tissue wastes such as diseased or spoiled crops on land at the farm where they are produced, for example, rotten potatoes.

You can get free advice on environmental regulations and how they may effect your farm from by following the link to the NetRegs.gov.uk website.

Wrexham Anaerobic Digestion Plant - site visit

In late July, some local volunteers joined with local environmental group the Wasteless Society who organised a group visit to the Fre-Energy anaerobic digester (www.fre-energy.co.uk) near Wrexham.  Hosted by its designer James Murcott, and his colleague Angie Bywater, who gave us a fascinating explanation and guided tour of the facility.

This is an on-farm digester, located on the largest organic dairy farm in Wales, with a daily intake of 30 tonnes of cow slurry plus 6 tonnes of chicken litter a day from a local broiler unit.

The outputs are 160kW of electricity and 200kW heat, of which approx 30kW electricity is used on site to power the adjoining engineering business, the Fre-energy office, and a large 7 bedroom farmhouse. Approx 60kW of heat is used to heat the cow slurry and chicken litter in the digester up to 40°C and the rest is used to heat the house and office. The surplus of the electricity is exported to the National Grid.

The digestate produced, is then separated with the liquid being stored in a lagoon before being spread onto the grassland using an umbilical cord through a spike aerator. The solid digestate, which contains a higher proportion of the phosphate and potash, is transported by road to land used for growing winter crops to feed the dairy herd. Several allotment owners in the local village have used this product and have been so impressed that the owners say they could market it for a substantial sum.

The Fre-energy digester was designed specifically to take farm and organic waste, such as food, or as previously noted, by-products from intensive chicken production. The owners do not agree with the principle of diverting the growing of crops to fuel digesters, just to produce electricity, but rather believe that the use of slurry and organic and food waste, is a key solution to many of the energy, fertilisation and pollution challenges in farming and food production today.

A big thanks to Kate Evans who organised the fascinating trip which hopefully helps to raise awareness of this emerging green technology. 

Making a compost toilet!

Making a Compost Toilet – Cwm Harry

Learn about the theory, principles and different techniques of compost toilets, the value of nutrient recycling and zero- waste systems. The workshop will include making a simple compost toilet for the community garden, giving you the skills to make one at home!!!

Start:	12 July 2014 9:30 am
End:	12 July 2014 4:30 pm
Venue:	Cwm Harry
Phone:	01686 626234
Address:	Cultivate Newtown Community Garden, Llanidloes Road, Newtown, Powys, SY16 4HX, Newtown, SY16 4HX, United Kingdom
Cost:	£30, bring and share lunch For more information visit www.cwmharry.org.uk

Shropshire business processing food waste

Shropshire Business Swancote Energy Ltd. http://www.swancoteenergy.com/ operate a state of the art Anaerobic Digestion plant on the outskirts of Bridgnorth. 

The 2.2MW plant produces enough renewable green energy for over 3,000 homes from a combination of food wastes and purpose grown energy crops, currently the annual processing capacity is 38,000 metric tonnes. 

Swancote Energy has a number of clients from across the West midlands region who send their waste here to avoid landfill charges and help reduce the environmental impact of waste management. The site contains the most up to date equipment available for processing food waste, which includes automated de-packaging machinery.  This gives them a crucial advantage when sourcing waste from retailers as they can accept it as it comes and then  separate the food waste from all types of packaging.

Their facility heats up the macerated waste to create a “soup” which bubbles away and creates a bio-gas (a mixture of carbon dioxide and methane) and digestate (a nitrogen rich fertiliser). A combined heat and power plant (generator) burns the biogas to create “green” electricity and heat. The electricity is fed directly into the national grid and the heat is used in the process.  The digestate is spread on nearby agricultural land to improve the soil. 

Anaerobic digestion is a process for dealing with organic waste which is sustainable, recovers the maximum energy and is a completely closed system with no emissions to air.  Income is generated through a combination of Feed in Tariffs and sales of electricity into the grid. In addition to this food waste attracts a gate fee as businesses will pay to get rid of it.

Owners Edward and Simon Davies said

“We could see that cost of power was only going to increase over the next 20 years. We realised that the payment tariffs available for AD would provide an alternative source of income for the farm as well as providing clean, renewable energy,”

Pro-Grow

Pro-Grow is a fine grade, peat free soil conditioner, made from green garden waste and food waste material generated by households across Veolias local authority contracts in the UK.  This unwanted waste put out by households and collected by Veolia on behalf of various local councils. 

They then take the waste material to large centralised commercial composting sites for screening and shredding.  The shredded material is then rotted down aerobically in huge piles which are turned regularly to keep them oxygenated.  The process creates a quality product that is rich in nutrients and essential trace elements, providing plants with an ideal growing medium.

This 'soil conditioner' has an open structure that will break down heavy clay soils and add humus to light sandy soils and help make your garden beautiful. It complies with the rigorous standards of the Soil Association’s certified product accreditation (Certificate Number I 4430) and is entirely natural, containing no added fertilisers.

 

Pro-grow is on sale in Shropshire at the Councils Household Recycling Centres (the 'tip') in:

 

- Bridgnorth

- Craven Arms

- Oswestry

- Shrewsbury

- Whitchurch

 

For more information on this product visit http://www.pro-grow.com

Harper Adams University Anaerobic Digestion facility

Did you know? Shropshire based Harper Adams University generate clean green energy from farm waste at their site in Newport, near Telford. 

The ENR-G (Energy and Nutrient Re-Generation) initiative aims to address three key policy issues identified in the Energy White Paper 2007. The project is a 350KWe waste to energy Anaerobic Digestion (AD) plant using College Farm waste and food waste streams diverted from landfill to generate renewable power. It will enable Harper Adams to be largely self sufficient in electricity and heat on the main College campus.

The project is financially sustainable and will create ongoing carbon equivalent savings of 11,229 tonnes pa, representing 3.4 times the current emissions from campus buildings. In addition, the College will fix electricity and heat prices for 10 years, reducing exposure to market volatility and improving its energy security. A demonstration and research programme will guide others through AD system implementation, where links to the College's award-winning biomass CHP system will be explored.

The creation of the plant was made possible by the award, in June 2009, of loan finance from the Higher Education Funding Council for England’s Revolving Green Fund. Harper Adams was one of only three UK projects to benefit from the £10 million fund. 

The University College then brought on board partners BiogenGreenfinch, who supplied the plant, and power company E.ON. The plant began to generate energy in April 2010, and the handover from Biogen was completed in the autumn 2010.

Compost direct from the farm

Peat free compost from Agripost

Agripost is a composting business based at Lower House Farm in the village of Cardeston, Shropshire (it lies near Ford on the main road between Shrewsbury and Welshpool).

The farmer runs a large scale commercial composting operation alongside traditional farming practices. They take green waste from local businesses and local councils and 'recycle' it into a peat-free compost that can be used for gardening, landscaping and farming purposes.

Agripost is a local composting operation processing thousands of tonnes of green garden waste from surrounding areas. They conform to the strict regimes laid down by the Environmental Agency and their WRAP Protocol and produce a PAS100 certified compost which means it can be sold. 

Although they have enough land to easily spread all the compost on their own farm they do very occasionally have (wholesale amounts only) of compost for sale on request.  Please note - they don't however sell small quantities of compost to individual residents - this is for large scale commercial contractors who want to buy literally tonnes of the stuff by the trailer load only. 

For those of you who are interested, general enquirers should contact  

Agripost - Telephone (01743) 821226

www.agripost.co.uk 

Shrewsbury commercial composting site investment

Shropshire farming and composting business Agripost Ltd. (who process all your garden waste) are making sustainability a top priority on their mixed farming unit in Cardeston near Shrewsbury.  The farm already acts as the central hub for the Councils garden waste collection and processes up to 15,000 tonnes of green waste every year helping to reduce landfill and make a high quality compost to spread on their land. 

Now the growing local business has erected a 50kW wind turbine on site to add to the existing biomass boiler and 200kW solar (PV) array mounted on the roofs of their poultry units.

Farmer & Managing Director, Mark Gethin said “The overall power needs of the poultry unit is some 300,000kw per annum. The solar panels provide approximately half of this, depending on the amount of daylight, sunshine and season. The proposed wind turbine will generate between 144,000 to 170,000 kw per year and in particular will generate electricity in winter and at night when the poultry units are net users of non PV energy.  The size of the wind turbine was chosen deliberately to generate the shortfall in renewable energy and for the first time will mean we are effectively self sufficient in power as a farm business” 

“We are aiming to become carbon neutral on the farm and the turbine investment is another way for us to generate our own electricity, complementing the solar panels perfectly.  We are also building an in-vessel composting facility to allow us to also compost food waste along side the green waste and an anaerobic digester to process food waste, slurry and chicken litter” he added

Wiggly Wigglers

We’re really fortunate to have 'green' businesses based in our area such as Wiggly Wigglers who are based out of the lovely Lower Blakemere Farm in rural Herefordshire. They started out as a small farm enterprise and used to operate from the farmhouse itself but such is their success and the increased interest in green gardening products that, as Wiggly Wigglers expanded (thanks to you all), they’ve outgrown the house and now they work in several of the farm’s outbuildings, which have been converted for life in the twenty-first century. 

They’ve also transformed the old walled garden into a wildlife haven where we are able to showcase many of the products that we sell, so that visitors can see their philosophy in action.  The company takes its name from the worm breeding side of the business and the fact that you can buy specialist worms and wormeries for home composting your food waste.  However they can mail order a much wider range of products that just wormeries these days - including everything you need for a green garden from British wildflower seeds, to bird food, water butts, compost bins, and much more besides.

To see their product range and support this local business visit www.wigglywigglers.co.uk

Christmas tree recycling 2014

Did you know? In the UK we get through almost 8 million real Christmas trees every year!

We estimate therefore that there must be about 60,000 dead Christmas trees left over in the Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin this January 2014! Please don't let them go to waste. 

You can compost them at home but its quite a challenge for most of us with small back gardens, so the lazy option to recycle real Christmas trees simply by putting them out for collection along with your garden waste or taking them to the local tip.  All real Christmas trees collected will get sent for commercial composting on local farms where they are shredded and rotted down to be turned into a valuable soil improver for local farmers.

Don't forget - remove any tinsel and other decorations first!

Compostable caddy liners to help Shropshire recycle more food waste

Shropshire Council is reminding residents in north and south Shropshire that special compostable liners are available to help them recycle their food waste.   

The liners are made from corn starch and are officially tested to be compostable so you can use them to bag up your kitchen waste and then add it to your green garden waste collection bin. The idea is to help residents to recycle more because using kitchen caddies and liners makes it clean and easy to collect up food waste in the kitchen.  

   

All the food waste and garden waste that they collect mixed together in these areas is taken to a specialist composting facility to be made into bags of compost - the type you buy from the garden center.  The liners can be purchased from the following council reception points -

• Ellesmere Library 
• Cheshire Street, Market Drayton
• Edinburgh House, Wem
• Whitchurch Heritage Centre
• Corve Street, Ludlow
• Church Stretton Library
• Shropshire Hills Discovery Centre, Craven Arms
• Cleobury Country Centre, Cleobury Mortimer
• Enterprise House, Bishop’s Castle.

Alternatively if you prefer to have them delivered liners can also be purchased over the phone, on 0844 472 1871, or online using the new www.shropshire.caddyliners.com web-based service. 

Bubble House Wormeries

Whether you are a single person living alone, a family with children, vegetarian or meat eater, or a business producing food or green waste, there is a better way of dealing with your organic waste than throwing it in the bin. Garden owner, allotment holder, flat dweller, business or educational establishment, this is the one component of rubbish that you can recycle yourselves, at source, with no need for it to be transported else where to be dealt with.

Earthworms have worked tirelessly for millenia aerating, tilling and fertilising the soil. The practise of vermiculture is at least a century old but fell out of fashion when the use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides became commonplace last century. Their use led to the destruction of earthworms on a colossal scale. Vermiculture is now being revived worldwide with diverse ecological objectives such as waste management, soil detoxification, soil regeneration and sustainable agriculture.
 

We are lucky in our area to have a local 'green' business (based just over the south Shropshire border in Worcestershire) called Bubblehouse Worms who breed our own worms as they don’t like the idea of them being imported, and they are hand harvested so that they reach the customers in peak condition. These wonderful creatures will gobble up your food waste and turn it into nature’s finest fertiliser, worm casts.

Bubblehouse sell a wide range of products for managing your waste and improving your garden but perhaps the most iconic is the stacked wormery which incorperates a pretty plant pot on the top.  This way you can keep worms, process food waste and grow your own whilst you're at it! They are ideal for places without access to a garden or for anyone who wants to be more sustainable.  For more information visit www.bubblehouseworms.com

 

Windfall fruit

As the nights draw in and we enter the season of 'mists and mellow fruitfulness' many of us will find our gardens and driveways carpeted in windfall fruit. 

We have had a few queries of late about this relating to this issue because whilst of course the best thing to do with windfall fruit is a) Eat it! and b) home compost it some folk seem to be unsure about if you can include this with your garden waste for the council collections.

Yes windfall fruit and vegetables from the garden are garden waste not food waste.  So it is perfectly OK to add this to the Councils garden waste collection service.

The confusion seems to have arisen because most garden waste in Shropshire goes for on-farm composting and following the BSE & Foot & Mouth strict Animal Byproduct Regulations were introduced which mean that food waste cannot be composted on farms.
Whilst of course fruit and vegetables are not an animal byproduct, the ban applies to anything from the kitchen so captures all food waste.  The distinction with material from your garden (whether edible or not) is clearly laid out in guidelines produced by the Department for the Environment.  The point at which this would change would be if you brought the items into your kitchen.  Anything which has been in the kitchen, could potentially be cross contaminated with pathogens from other foodstuffs and thus would then be deemed to be kitchen waste which cannot currently be composted on farms due to the Animal Byproduct Regulations.

Hopefully that clears up any confusion? Because looking around my area I can see tonnes of fruit all over the ground right now and I would hate to think that might end up in landfill when it is perfectly OK to compost it with your garden waste.

Shropshire composting site invests in green energy

Wind turbine adds fuel to farm’s sustainable energy targets

A Shropshire farming & composting business is making sustainability a top priority on its mixed farming unit and adding wind power to a growing list of renewable energy sources.

Gethin and Co has erected a 50kw single wind turbine at Lower House near Cardeston near Shrewsbury for commissioning in April. The turbine is 36.4m (120ft) tall with three 9.6m (31ft) blades.

Lower House Farm is a mixed farming enterprise comprising arable crops, poultry rearing and a green waste composting facility. With energy prices increasing, Mark and Claire Gethin and next generation Sophie and Matthew are keen to adopt a variety of energy sources to meet their ambition to become more self sufficient in energy.

Although planning permission was granted in 2011 for a 2160 solar panel array mounted on the roofs of the existing poultry units, only about half the solar panels were erected because the feed in tariff rate changed and it became uneconomic to erect the remainder.

“The Gethins realised that other complementary renewable energy systems were needed particularly to provide energy at night time,” explained Peter Fenwick, a planning consultant with Berrys who has been advising the Gethins on renewable energy and planning options.

“The overall power needs of the poultry unit is some 300,000kw per annum. The solar panels provide approximately half of this, depending on the amount of daylight, sunshine and season. The proposed wind turbine will generate between 144,000 to 170,000 kw per year and in particular will generate electricity in winter and at night when the poultry units are net users of non PV energy.

“The size of the wind turbine was chosen deliberately to generate the shortfall in renewable energy for the farm business,” Peter added.

As is often the case, there was local opposition to the planning application and Shropshire Council rejected the wind turbine at first, but after a successful planning appeal presented by Berrys permission was granted.

The council originally rejected the scheme because it felt the siting would have a detrimental effect on the landscape and be intrusive to neighbours.

“We argued that the chosen site has a good wind resource location and since the nearest non involved residential property was some 600 metres away there would be no noise or shadow flicker effect. The turbine is a single slim structure so the slim aerofoil shaped turbine blades will blend into the environment and not move quickly enough to disturb the general tranquillity of the landscape,” he added.

Wind energy will be a vital contributor to the energy demands of the farming operation at Lower House Farm , complementing the solar panels and biomass boiler producing heat in the poultry houses. Methane from the green waste is used in a combined heat and power unit to breakdown the waste in a closed loop system.

“With energy prices set to rise further farmers need to consider all their options and adopt renewable technology where possible to become more energy self sufficient,” Peter added.

Sophie Gethin says the turbine project ran relatively smoothly, once the original objections from neighbours had been overcome. The slim body of the Endurance turbine was installed by Dulas the second week of March with the Nacelle and Blades being added the following week, after the concrete had set. It will hopefully be commissioned the first week of April.

“We are aiming to become carbon neutral on the farm and the turbine is another way for us to generate our own electricity, complementing the solar panels perfectly. When the sun isn’t out we will have wind power,” said Sophie.

“We are also building an in-vessel composting facility to take green waste and food waste and an anaerobic digester to take food waste, slurry and chicken litter,” she added.

Composting Bracken in Shropshire

The Long Mynd in Shropshire is a fabulous and famous hill in the south Shropshire hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.  The entire site, is owned by the National Trust and is maintained for public access, common grazing and natural beauty.

One of the environmental problems faced at this site is that of Bracken encroachment: this is a problem throughout the uplands of Britain, but particularly so on the Long Mynd where 60% of all the hill is now affected. The problem is being tackled in two ways:

1. where bracken grows amongst acid grassland e.g. the northern and eastern side of the hill, the bracken is mown on a regular basis, this does not eliminate the problem but reduces its vigour and prevents further encroachment.
2. where it is growing amongst heather it is not possible to mow so a chemical treatment is being used (applied in larger areas by helicopter) which does not affect any other vegetation or wildlife.

Each year the Trust removes nearly 17 hectares of bracken! Alot of this is then managed through composting.  Thats one big compost heap! You can buy the compost they make from this operation from the Shropshire Wildlife Trust shop on Abbey Foregate in Shrewsbury. 

Shropshire Composters Seminar

Volunteer Master Composters from all around Shropshire, Telford & Wrekin got together this week to discuss ways to help reduce waste in Shropshire. The event particularly focused on food waste and was hosted at the Councils Food Enterprise Centre in Shrewsbury which was set up as an incubator unit to develop new food related businesses within the county.


We were given an excellent presentation by Garden Organics National Home Composting Programme Co-ordinator Alex Heelis about a research project she has been involved with which has demonstrated that getting households to separate food waste off for home composting can actually produce a waste prevention effect by heightening their awareness of the scale of food waste generally.

Around 20 volunteers attended the event along with representatives from the local waste authorities also attended to update the volunteers about their plans for improving waste management awareness, services and infrastructure in the county to help reduce the amount of waste which we create in the first place as well as minimising what has to go to landfill.

The event was sponsored by Veolia Environmental Services, the Councils waste contractor.

Evergreen gas

Evergreen Gas is a British engineering company based right here in Shropshire established to develop modular small-scale renewable energy anaerobic digestion plants for farms and communities. This is in response both to government policy and to market demand which appears keen to see smaller AD plants developed. The Evergreen Gas design is radical and will look unlike the traditional AD plants which we are used to seeing.

 
They have developed a range of small scale AD plants based on electricity outputs ranging from just 25kW to 250kW.  

They are building a pilot-prototype, known as BMAD (Barrett’s Mill Anaerobic Digester), in South Shropshire to test the concept and to carry out research into optimising performance. This pilot construction should be complete by the end of 2012.

BMAD will be used not only as a pilot AD plant but also for demonstrating the feasibility of small-scale biogas upgrade for vehicle use. To this end Evergreen Gas has already purchased the first of its VW Caddy Ecofuel CNG vans to use as the Company Vehicle.

You can follow progress on BMAD and other projects via their on-line monthly report 

Composting legislation - myth busting

For those sites that compost on a large scale such as the farmers who deal with the garden waste collected by Councils and anyone who deals with community composting you could be forgiven for thinking that the legislation can seem like a bit of a headache! You need to consider planning, Animal By-Product Regulations, waste carriers licence, and whether you need a T23, U10, or U11 exemption certificates to name but a few.  It all seems like too much for any sane person to manage and surely beyond the wit of a small not-for-profit group?  

Well not neccessarily, because there are groups in Shropshire and across the UK who run community composting sites and manage to navigate this maze.  It can be done and there is a good case economically and environmentally for having lots of small scale composters rather than trucking organic waste around the country to large centralised sites.   And there is a lot of support out there for this - there is a whole network of composters; The Community Composting Network (CCN) as well as experts at local charities like Garden Organic to guide you through the process.  Also you can contact the Waste Management Department at your local authority and most will be keen to encourage anything which reduces the amount of waste they have to deal with after all!  So dont be put off, the legislation just aims to keep everyone safe and its mostly applicable to animal health, aimed at avoiding another outbreak of foot and mouth etc, so tends to be more concerned with food waste, if you are just processing green waste that alone makes it alot more simple, so dont give up, it can be done.

The good news is that for home composting you dont need to even consider this at all, the legislation is simple. But if you are a community group such as an allotment, a church yard, a parish council or anyone who wants to involve the local community in managing their own garden waste then drop Jane an email jgriffiths@gardenorganic.org.uk who is a leading national expert on community composting and can point you in the right direction.  

Christmas tree recycling

Did you know? In the UK we get through 8 million real Christmas trees every year! 

As such we estimate there are around 55,000 dead Christmas trees left over across the Shropshire, Telford & Wrekin area alone.  Please don't let them go to waste.  They make a great addition to your home compost heap but if you cannot manage them at home the local Councils can deal with them for you.

You can recycle real Christmas trees simply by putting them out for collection along with your garden waste or taking them to your local recycling centre.  All real Christmas trees collected will get sent for composting and turned into valuable soil improver for local farmers and horticulturalists to grow food with.

   

Top tips

• Make sure you put the tree out on the correct day for your garden waste collection.
• If you can please try to get the tree into your garden waste bin.
• If you cannot, you may leave the tree next to your garden waste bin.
• To help the crews please cut trees down to a maximum 5 foot (1.5m) lengths.
• Please make sure you remove any tinsel and other decorations first