Don’t Buy a Christmas Tree Hire a Christmas Tree and Offset Your Carbon Footprint

It has become plain fact that we all need to get our own carbon emissions and carbon footprint reduced to something that our planet can sustain. Numerous schemes have arisen for businesses to do their bit and multiple announcements have been blasted through the media to urge individuals to do what they can. It’s an uncomfortable truth but we have to fight to save our struggling atmosphere. Fortunately it’s not all doom and gloom, there is at least one way to take a huge chunk off of your carbon footprint while making no extra effort at all.
There are many ways to reduce or offset the carbon that you as an individual or business produce. These range from better insulation, hiring a company to plant trees for you, and car sharing to monitoring electricity usage and growing your own food to cut down on packaging and transport. All of these methods are of course very valid, however they have one thing in common; they either cost you in time or money. However, there is one way that offsets 10% of your carbon footprint – to hire and not to buy a Christmas tree - that is actually easier than the traditional way of doing things.
Christmas trees for hire are pot grown and delivered to your home at the advent of Christmas. You can then decorate and enjoy your tree in the usual way before having it collected. Once collected your Christmas tree will be planted out to create woodlands and in its lifetime will absorb around 10% of your annual carbon footprint.If everybody who bought a cut Christmas tree – over 8 million people in the UK alone – hired a Christmas tree instead we would offset around 8 million tonnes of carbon from one year’s Christmas trees. This is no small amount of carbon and would even make a difference in the grand scale of the problem. In addition to this your Christmas tree will be delivered as one of a batch of around 20 trees that are in transit. This means that 19 vehicles are kept of the road, resulting in a further reduction of carbon in the atmosphere.
The environmental benefits of hiring a Christmas tree don’t end there. When planted out the trees create woodland which is fantastic habitat for wildlife and great leisure grounds for the community. Hired Christmas trees are usually a better shape and of a bushier nature than cut trees as they are nurtured and pruned throughout their growing phase. Another advantage is that as a hired Christmas tree stays alive and fresh throughout the festive season it does not drop needles like a cut Christmas tree does.
As a new concept in conservation and climate control there are limited sources for hiring a Christmas tree, however some do now offer a national service that allows anyone to take part. With the right support it is clear that such projects will take off and create a vital impact in reducing our carbon footprint to one that our planet can sustain.