Can nothing protect us from a plague of plastic tree protectors? They’ve descended on us like locusts, covering our hills, dales and roadsides with a nasty green and black petrochemical swarm. They are not for the most part biodegradable, and those that claim to be will still disintegrate into microplastic debris lodged into our soil.
Tree protectors have descended on us like locusts, covering our hills with a nasty petrochemical swarm
I should know. Five years ago I planted 3,000 tree saplings on the fields below our house; and there to this day the pale green square or tubular guards remain, the young trees having outgrown any need for protection and the guards, or remnants of guards, littering the grassy slope. I know we’ll have to remove and collect them. I know it will be a bugger of a job because they get snagged with grass, nettles and brambles, and the plastic will have become brittle and liable to shatter. I know that cutting the polypropylene tubes or unwinding the PVC wrap-around spirals renders most of them unusable for second plantings. And I know most landowners and highways agencies never bother.
We’ll do it, nevertheless; but we’re now resolved that new plantings will either be without protectors (meaning that around a half instead of the usual three-quarters are likely to survive) or else with one of the new, environmentally friendly types – of which more in a moment. But I despair of seeing any major move by Britain’s big tree–planters to change their ways. The Woodland Trust pledged three years ago to stop using these plastic nuisances, but – online – still appear to be selling them, presumably because demand is strong. Whatever happened to the good old Darwinian sink-or-swim principle? Our era’s soft-headed approach to social policy appears to extend now even to trees.
Jake Fiennes is conservation manager at the Holkham Estate in Norfolk and, knowing him, I turned to him for advice. ‘Plastic tree protectors?’ he said. ‘My pet hate!’ Luckily (he went on) the estate’s owners are civic minded enough to give him the resources to remove protectors once they’re of no more use. This he did for 25 miles of new hedging – and pulling broken plastic out of hedges is no easy task. ‘We filled a whole articulated lorry with the stuff, taking it down to the docks bound for China, where they make plastic furniture with it.’
I can’t think what we’ll do with our own 3,000 protectors. We’ve used a mixture of big square-form pale green ones – box-shaped – and 2ft-high pale green tubes, plus an assortment of the wrap-around spiral types: at least two or three pick-up truck loads, I reckon. Would our recycling centre accept them for their non-recyclable household waste skip? And anyway they’d end up as landfill. Leaving them to disintegrate into our own land is also a kind of landfill, and no worse.
Our national climate advisory body wants us to increase forest cover from the present 13 per cent to 19 per cent by 2050. The Woodland Trust says this would mean planting more than 1.5 billion trees. I’m all for it. But, assuming 75 per cent survival rates, that’s about two billion tree protectors. Because these plantings take place incrementally in patches, and when seen generally meet with approval because we like trees, the blow to the environment is softened. But our successors will be faced a huge task which has built up slowly.
It is time, therefore, to move decisively against the use of petrochemicals in tree protection. One way of doing so is simply to ban the things and stop giving saplings any protection at all, reducing survival rates: an ill wind that would blow hares, rabbits and deer some good – perhaps too much good. Jake says protectors are not an unmitigated blessing for saplings, which can get snagged. But it does force them upwards in the early years, stopping them from bushing out around the base. That’s useful, though by the same token it deprives them of a certain amount of sunlight. It also protects against the wind (a big problem for tender young saplings here in the Peak District), but trees can be staked with bamboo or hardwood, minus the protector.
Or else there’s the option of alternative, biodegradable kinds of protection. Wool-based guards have been developed but are very expensive. Cardboard is looking a more attractive way forward. A range of types and prices is available – Jake showed me, for instance the Grown Green type he’s started to use, but there are others, similar, on the market. With a square cross-section and guides for stakes, they have air-holes for ventilation to stop overheating and a white paper lining to reflect light downward because cardboard (unlike plastic) is almost opaque. Jake says they appear to be staying sufficiently rigid for sufficiently long.
Eventually, of course, cardboard will sag and fall apart, but we who do composting know that cardboard in limited quantities is actually good for the mix in a composting bin and will enrich rather than pollute. Also available are maize-starch protectors wrapped around a three-stake framework: too much work if you’re planting many saplings.
I’ve checked on prices. If you shop around and buy in bulk, plastic wrap-around spirals remain easily the cheapest, but cardboard is now competitive with the pale green tube-type protectors. And of course if you factor in the labour costs of removing the plastic ones after five years or more, that adds to the expense. Few, however, would factor in removal costs, and that’s sadly because few have any serious plans to remove them.
In a much wider field than just arboriculture, I’m coming to the conclusion that taxation rather than banning environmentally unfriendly stuff is the way forward. A broad government inquiry could lead to a new Act of Parliament that establishes a universal framework for assessing the collection and end-of-life costs of plastics, including packaging, and tying this to a tariff imposed through tax. If you manufacture stuff then you (and your customers) should pay for its environmentally friendly disposal. And there’s nothing unconservative or un-free-market about that.
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