Residents have saved more than £6,000 by taking part in this year’s Christmas tree recycling programme.

Sadly for Croydon, these are Lambeth residents saving their council and their own money.

In total, 85 tons of Christmas trees have been collected for recycling in Lambeth this year, a big increase from the 56 tonnes collected last year.

Lambeth Council has been running the kerbside collection service for real Christmas trees for the past six years.

The collected trees are turned into compost for use on farmland, rather than, as often seems to have been the case around Croydon, being dumped on suburban pavements in the hope that, eventually, someone might remove them, usually to landfill, to rot away.

Otherwise in Croydon, you have to haul your Christmas tree to a dumping point. If you are a resident in one of those flats in central Croydon into which the council wants to shoehorn another 17,000 residents, while assuming none of them will own a car (yeah!), your appointed tree dumping point is at the southern end of Oaks Road, a challenging ride on the tram and a 15-minute walk with your Xmas tree. There is no other public transport to Oaks Road.

Croydon Council might have its own new flash £140 million HQ building, but it can’t match Conservative Wandsworth, LibDem Sutton or even Labour-run Lambeth, Merton and Southwark when it comes to such an efficient, and money-saving, kerbside Christmas tree collection scheme.

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