Birmingham St Mary’s Hospice Treecycling Campaign

Treecycling is our hugely successful, and much appreciated, fundraising and community environmental service that gets bigger and better every year – as well as generating significant income from the community (£270k over 9 years), it has raised the profile of the Hospice, engaged significant corporate support, and helped recruit many new individual volunteers. Its growth is dramatic and shows no sign of slowing.

With the help of Junk Hunters, who provided enthusiastic volunteers and a collection vehicle, Treecycling grew yet again last year by about 25%. We collected more than 4500 trees with the help of 180 volunteers and 70 vehicles, saved countless trips to the tip and raised over £85,000 towards the care of patients with life limiting illnesses, and their families, in Birmingham and Sandwell. Our services cost around £9M a year, and we need to raise over 60% of that through fund raising events and voluntary donations, so we were especially pleased to welcome Junk Hunters to the Treecycling team in 2020.

The campaign operates across South and West Birmingham and Solihull. Supporters book and donate online during December and early January to have their used Christmas trees collected by teams of corporate and community volunteers over a weekend in early January. The trees are taken to temporary collection points where they are chipped and taken to power stations, again by corporate volunteers, for use as biomass fuel.