Christmas trees head for landfill as recycle plan binned

HUNDREDS of Christmas trees are set to be dumped in landfill rather than recycled after being collected by the council.

Last year all of the Christmas trees left on the Capital's streets were collected and recycled into compost as part of a special council uplift programme.

But this year the cash-strapped local authority has limited this collection to areas without the brown bins for garden waste.

People with brown bins have the choice of chopping up trees themselves and placing them in the bins, or taking them to a recycling centre. If they choose to simply leave the trees out for collection, then they will be picked up by rubbish crews and sent to landfill.

Council sources told the News the change was down to cost cutting but the city's environment leader, Robert Aldridge, insisted it was because last year's uplift had not been as successful as anticipated with 105 tonnes of Christmas trees collected instead of the 500 tonnes expected.

City leaders argue that the 109,000 homes with a brown bin can use them to put their unwanted trees out for recycling.

But opposition politicians today said the Lib Dem administration was failing in its election pledge to increase recycling targets.

Labour's environment spokeswoman, Councillor Maureen Child, said: "It is clearly less of a service than what seemed to work well under the previous administration."

The 2007 Christmas tree recycling programme saw more than 60 tonnes of trees picked up across the city in just four days last January before eventually topping the 100-tonne mark.

Any trees taken to landfill sites with the household rubbish will be left to decompose and will produce methane gas, a major contributor to global warming.

Councillor Steve Burgess, the city's Green spokesman, said: "If this administration are as serious as they claim to be about recycling then landfilling these trees should be a very last resort."

Latest figures show the Capital's recycling rate is running at around 26 per cent – below the Scottish average of 29.8 per cent.

Edinburgh exceeded a target of 25 per cent recycling set by the Scottish Executive in 2006 but faces a series of tougher challenges over the coming years, with a need to get 55 per cent of all waste recycled by 2020.

The next target facing the council is 30 per cent recycling of all waste by next year, but officials are hoping to set their own target of 40 per cent by around 2012.

Councillor Aldridge said: "The council ran a pilot kerbside recycling scheme for Christmas trees last year. Unfortunately, the amount collected did not make the scheme viable in either environmental or financial terms.

"As a result, our focus this year was on encouraging residents to make use of their brown bins and the Community Recycling Centres, with a 'last resort' option of leaving the trees out with domestic waste.

"We are looking at ways of recycling Christmas trees next year as part of a wider review of our recycling strategy. Edinburgh has a very good recycling record but I appreciate that there is always more that can be done."

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• www.edinburgh.gov.uk/wasteaware