We use some essential cookies to make this website work.
We’d like to set additional cookies to understand how you use forestresearch.gov.uk, remember your settings and improve our services.
We also use cookies set by other sites to help us deliver content from their services.
This research aims to determine the practicality, durability, and efficacy of non-plastic biodegradable tree shelters and other tree protection methods as alternatives to using tree shelters made from conventional plastics. We will be subjecting the products and methods to independent objective scrutiny using robust and statistically valid methods allowing the data we collect to be analysed and placed in the public domain for peer review in a reputable scientific journal.
Tree shelters were invented by the Forestry Commission in the 1970s and have proven to be a successful innovation, with many tens of millions of units produced and used worldwide, by a variety of different manufacturers.
However, conventional tree shelters can form a source of plastic pollution if they are not collected at the end of their useful life. A number of manufacturers have therefore been striving to develop biodegradable products that could potentially be left on site without a need for them to be removed and recycled. Various claims have been made as to the efficacy and environmental credentials of these products.
We will be carrying out an independent investigation of tree shelters being brought to market as alternatives to those made from conventional plastics. The research project will consist of three elements:-
1) Field experiments on a range of contrasting forest sites across Britain to determine the practicality, durability, and efficacy of non-plastic biodegradable tree shelters, and other silvicultural approaches.
2) An assessment of likely environmental impact and degradation end points of the alternative products used in the field experiments, based on evidence provided by manufacturers.
3) A time and method study focusing on the costs and practicality of using the different products.
This work is funded by the Science and Innovation Strategy for Forestry in Great Britain; the Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra); and a group of eleven organisations from across the forest industry in the UK and Ireland which collectively form the ‘Forestry Plastics Group’ comprising:- Coillte; Forestry England; Forest Services England; Forestry and Land Scotland; The Welsh Government (in partnership with Natural Resources Wales); the National Trust; Scottish Forestry; Tilhill via the Scottish Forestry Trust; the Woodland Trust; the Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust; the Yorkshire Dales National Park.
Principal Silviculturist
Cookies are files saved on your phone, tablet or computer when you visit a website.
We use cookies to store information about how you use the dwi.gov.uk website, such as the pages you visit.
Find out more about cookies on forestresearch.gov.uk
We use 3 types of cookie. You can choose which cookies you're happy for us to use.
These essential cookies do things like remember your progress through a form. They always need to be on.
We use Google Analytics to measure how you use the website so we can improve it based on user needs. Google Analytics sets cookies that store anonymised information about: how you got to the site the pages you visit on forestresearch.gov.uk and how long you spend on each page what you click on while you're visiting the site
Some forestresearch.gov.uk pages may contain content from other sites, like YouTube or Flickr, which may set their own cookies. These sites are sometimes called ‘third party’ services. This tells us how many people are seeing the content and whether it’s useful.