With Twelfth Night upon us, residents are being urged to support the Woodland Trust's annual Christmas card recycling scheme by making use of special collection bins.

With Twelfth Night upon us, residents are being urged to support the Woodland Trust's annual Christmas card recycling scheme by making use of special collection bins.

They will be at WH Smith high street stores, Tesco stores (including selected Express), TK Maxx and all Marks and Spencer stores throughout Norfolk until the end of the month.

All the cards collected during the campaign are taken to paper mills where they are recycled into new products, with the money raised helping the Wood-land Trust plant thousands of new trees in the UK.

A national collection target of 100 million cards has been set this year, which will enable 24,000 trees to be planted and save 2,600 tonnes of CO2 equivalent greenhouse gases - the same as taking more than 800 cars off the road for a year.

Ian Monson, Norfolk County Council's cabinet member for environment and waste, said: “As Christ-mas cards are not accepted in the regular household recycling collection serv-ice, we are delighted to be able to offer people so many places to drop off cards throughout the county.

“Last year, Norfolk residents recycled more than 50 tonnes of cards, helping the Woodland Trust to plant thousands of trees, and we hope the scheme will be even more successful this year.”

Real Christmas trees and Christmas cards, along with glass bottles and jars, batt-eries and catalogues, can be taken to the coun-cil's 19 recycling centres.

For details, call 0844 800 8004 or visit www.norfolk. gov.uk/recyclingcentres