Disposing of Your Old Christmas Tree

Christmas begins when a real Christmas Tree arrives in the front door. There is no escaping the festive cheer it brings to a home. The real Christmas tree is a the heart of every Christmas and converts an otherwise lifeless room into a space with real energy and cheer.

Really, I could go on and on about the merits of having a real Christmas tree but what is more pressing is to help resolve one of the main draw backs to buying a real tree each year. That is the issue of what to do with your tree once the festive season has drawn to a close. Below are tips and advice for people in Ireland on how to dispose of their own Christmas tree.

The first thing to consider is of course the environmental impact in disposing of a real tree. As a tree breaks down it will release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The best way to dispose of a tree and to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide released is to mulch is or burn it. By doing so you can reduce the amount of CO₂ released by up to 80%. Chopping the tree into smaller pieces and burning in a chiminea is a good way of doing this.

You can of course send your tree to a landfill but the slow decomposition process will lead to an increased amount of CO₂ released to the atmosphere. Approx. 16Kg of CO₂ is released from an average sized Christmas tree when it is decomposed in a landfill. That's compared to just 3.5Kg released from the same tree that is mulched or burned.

There are many locations around the country where you can bring your tree after Christmas. Council landfills in each county in Ireland will take your tree and most will do so for free. Better again, these trees won’t rot away in a landfill they will be mulched to form a usable weed control mulch or form a surface or paths around national paths and parks.

You too can quickly mulch your own tree and keep those chippings for your own garden. Mulch from Christmas trees can be used in many ways in the garden. You can use your mulch to form the surface for paths, you can use it to keep weeds down around vegetables, you can use it to act as a blanket on soils and keep soils moist and warm during the year and lastly you can add your mulched tree to your compost heap to add additional nutrients to the soil.