Why plastic tree guards are hampering efforts to tackle climate change - Yorkshire Post letters

Yet another letter advocating planting more trees to correct climate change from Mandy Hillier (The Yorkshire Post, February 5).

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All very laudable until the last paragraph when she says “offer cash to buy plants and the protection needed to help them thrive”.

This ‘protection’ is typically, a three-foot long plastic tube about three inches in diameter and each separate tree has a tube.

We are planting plastic to save the planet and it is not necessary. Trees have grown without tubes for thousands of years.

One company alone manufactures ten million tree guards a year and these tubes do not degrade.

They are still there, usually in shreds, 15 years later.

The problem of these redundant tubes littering the countryside has now become so acute that The Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust is organising ‘wombling’ parties to allow volunteers to collect this plastic poison from watercourses and hedge bottoms.

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We need to ban these unsightly poisonous plastic tubes immediately.

At least this would allow the newly-planted trees to do what we want them to do which is to collect carbon rather than be coated in it.