Christmas may feel like a distant haze of cheese and cooked meat, but the time has come to throw out your rapidly-dropping Christmas tree.
This week only, Lambeth council will be picking up your unwanted real Christmas tree for free, if you leave it by the side of the road on the day of your normal rubbish and recycling collection.
The council’s new cabinet member for the environment, cllr Imogen Walker, was so excited about the prospect that she took her own tree into Windrush Square to pose for a photograph today.
Cllr Walker said: “People can just leave their unwanted tree next to their bin on their normal collection day.
“Pine trees are quite acidic, so the trees are chipped and then mixed with other green waste to make them suitable for use as a soil improver that is distributed to farms.
“Every tonne of waste that we have to send for disposal costs the council, and therefore council taxpayers, £136 in disposal charges, so every tonne we can divert really counts.”
Lambeth has been running a kerbside collection service for real Christmas trees for the past six years. It expects to collect some 7,000 trees by the end of the week.
