Christmas Tree Collection
Every year, on a wet or chilly weekend in early January, you’ll find us out and about, dragging your unwanted Christmas trees off to be recycled and shredded into chippings for green energy generation.
Our annual Christmas tree collection is the group’s only regular fundraising activity, and we ask all parents to get involved. Each year, we raise over £6,000 for the group, while providing a useful and much appreciated service to the local community. The money we raise helps us to keep our membership fees low, making scouting accessible to everyone in the community and one of the best value activities available for young people in the Weston Green area. It also allows us to buy vital equipment including tents, camping gear, minibuses and trailers.
Parents can help in a variety of roles:
- before the event, we need to put out publicity, advertise, and drop leaflets, so people who live in our catchment area can sign up and book their tree collection.
- before and during the event, we need people to organise parents and other volunteers into collection teams, arrange vehicles and trailers, plan collection routes, take bookings and payments
- on the day, we head out in teams of three – a driver, a navigator and a tree lugger – in our minibuses and rented vans. Each team does a four-hour session. The collection is done in three or four shifts over a single weekend, and we collect around 1,000 trees in that time!
In 2023, a team of 45 parent volunteers collected 1000 trees in 11 hours. We are extremely grateful to Sandown Park racecourse, who generously allowed us to use their land to pile all the trees up. We used a surrey-based company, Greenwood’s Tree Contractors, to process the trees. Their ultimate destination was Kent Renewable Energy, where they were used as biomass feed to generate electricity in a combined heat and power plant.
If you’d like us to collect your Christmas tree once Christmas is over, you can book at www.collectmytree.co.uk.
Relevant documents
Public liability insurance certificate 2023
Risk Assessment for Christmas tree collection activities
