So … here we are. 2010. Oh yes, Happy New Year.

2009 seems a distant memory, and the last mince pie crumbs have been swept away. Thoughts have turned already to new beginnings, of hot footing it down to the gym, getting fit, actually sticking to the New Year resolutions you made (if you haven’t already broken them) and we are being urged to buy holidays or sofas that we don’t have to pay for until after the London Olympics, which we will have watched on our now old sofas or flown off to avoid.

Tomorrow signals the official end of the Christmas period, marked in the Christmas Carol ‘the Twelve days of Christmas’ by twelve drummers drumming, which is an unusual gift to give your true love, by anyone’s standards. There might not be twelve drummers drumming tomorrow, but as it also signifies the final moment to take down Christmas decorations. There will certainly be thousands of sad, dejected looking Christmas trees strewn about, dumped in bins, left down alley ways, starting a journey that will see them eventually ending up on a landfill site.

In fact MB has already spotted a number of Christmas trees discarded in bins and last year it was estimated that 967,000 trees in London alone were thrown away. MB isn’t sure how many trees constitute a forest, but nearly one million sounds like a small forest at least.

However, it doesn’t have to be like this, as all 33 London boroughs now offer additional Christmas tree recycling services. MB’s own local council offer a ‘brown bin’ service for those who choose, whereby you can leave your Christmas tree next to your brown bin on the usual collection day and it will be taken away for recycling.  They have also opened special recycling points where trees can be taken, or arrangements can be made online using their ‘Bulky Waste service, and your tree will collected for recycling. These kinds of services are across the board as far as London Boroughs go, and many of the trees they collect will be used as compost on their parks in the spring. Many other local Councils around the UK are offering similar services, or at least making provision for the recycling of Christmas trees.

To find out what your own borough is offering in the way of Christmas tree recycling options, you could phone them or if you live in London, have a look at the Recycle for London website who give a detailed list of all the boroughs and the recycling services they provide. They also suggest how you can best re-use or recycle Christmas cards, wrapping paper and many other of the unwanted bits ‘n bobs that we all discard during the Christmas period.

So, if you have pledged to be a bit ‘greener’ this year then you can start by recycling your Christmas tree. Even if you haven’t, then you still can. It’s quite easy.