Paris:
For the second year, Paris City Hall in the French capital has organised an environment-friendly operation to recycle Christmas trees.
Citizens of Paris have been asked to bring their Christmas trees to one of the 95 dedicated sites across the city to be chopped and crushed and then recycled into potting compost.
Around 5,600 trees have already been collected and Paris City Hall expects to recycle 15,000 trees in total.
The recycling operations were launched on January 2 and will go on until February 1.
"We realised that this is raw material for us," Come Levesque, a horticulturist working for Paris City Hall, said. "So it is better that they are in our gardens rather than in a bin and then incinerated, so we collect them."
Leveque was supervising the grinding up of more than 300 Christmas trees on Monday in a northeastern Paris park.
"Parisians come on foot to dump them because cars are not allowed in the parks, " he said. "Then we bring the trees we find on the pavement to the collecting sites.