FAQ

Common questions about Climate Shop, donations, and how trees get planted. Still stuck? .

What is Climate Shop?

Climate Shop is a small chain of 4 volunteer-staffed second-hand stores in West Wales that raises funds for tropical tree planting through the sale of donated household gear and clothes. All the goods received through Treees are either sold in our stores, through our Facebook Buy and Sell group, or through our eBay shop. Climate Shop is administered by Treeflights Ltd, a non-profit social enterprise and a company limited by guarantee. Treeflights is registered at Companies House (Company Number 6462199).

How can I be sure that my trees are really planted?

We have been supporting the community of Boré in Kenya to plant carbon drawdown trees since 2008 and in that time have developed stringent monitoring and verification protocols to ensure that the trees are planted, managed, and well maintained for the long term. The planting work is administered locally by our partners, the Boré Green Umbrella (BGU), a self-help community group which has a membership of 5000 subsistence farmers and 200 schools. We have a large community tree nursery that employs 60 female workers and has an annual propagation capacity of 1.5 million trees. The trees are supplied for free to the members who plant them on their own land. The BGU have a team of 4 planting site monitors whose job is to visit and log the GPS coordinates of all the planting sites, record the details of the planted trees, and ensure that any losses are made good. All planting sites can be viewed on Google Maps and once Google have updated their satellite imagery and the trees have grown (usually around 2–3 years) they are readily visible to anyone that wants to check. We also welcome any visitors that wish to check on their trees in person. if that is something that is of interest to you.

How many trees will my items plant?

In simple terms, the more valuable your donated items are, the more money they will raise and the more trees we'll be able to plant. We can't guarantee the allocation of any particular number of trees for a given donation parcel because this depends on a large number of factors including the state of the articles donated, the price that we can sell the item for, and how many similar items we may have in stock at any time. When we receive items that we are unable to sell, we have to pay to recycle them and that means fewer trees get planted.

What should I send?

Basically, anything nice that you want to magically convert into lovely, carbon-heavy, tropical trees — but smaller, higher-value stuff costs us less in courier fees so that stuff is ideal. We're happy to receive pretty much anything nice and saleable. Shiny techy type gizmos like phones and tablets are very planty; boxed tidy games, jewellery, and designer or vintage clothes are likewise. Broken toys, coat hangers, video tapes, and dirty shoes/clothes end up costing us cash for disposal, so that's like cutting down trees — please don't send us that stuff. Check out the list of goodies we love on the Donation page, or play our Declutter game, and you should get a good idea of what works and what doesn't. If you have a Fabergé egg or an old Picasso sketch cluttering up your kitchen drawer, and we'll be round in the morning to collect. These kinds of things are Super Foresty.

Can I send more than one parcel?

Yes, by all means — but please just send us one at a time.

How big can my parcel be?

Your parcel can be up to 50×40×30 cm and weigh up to 15 kg. If you have anything larger or heavier (or particularly unusual) to donate, please and let us know what you would like to give. We'll get back to you as soon as we can and, if possible, arrange a bespoke collection of your gear.

How long will it take to assess my donations?

We try to process each donation parcel within 3 days but at busy times it can take up to a week. As soon as we have assessed your parcel, you will receive a notification letting you know how many trees we have planted for you and all the details of the plantings are automatically recorded on your personal Treees page.

How many trees do I get and when do I get them?

Trees are planted as you move through the donation journey (and when friends join via your referral):

Sign up — 10 trees
Book a donation — 3 trees
Drop-off scan — 2 trees
Warehouse arrival — 2 trees
Assessment — a further bundle of trees after we assess your donations (this can take up to a week at busy times)
Friend signs up via your referral — 5 trees to you
Friend donates via your referral — 2 trees to you

Why are the trees planted in Kenya?

Trees in the tropics grow up to 10 times faster than those in temperate latitudes. There is no winter down there by the Equator so every single day is a growing day. This means that they absorb atmospheric carbon far faster — so if we want to plant trees to help fight against climate breakdown, it's far better to plant down there. Beyond that, the tropical forest communities of sub-Saharan Africa are being heavily impacted by climatic changes that they have had absolutely no hand in creating. These are poor people with little resilience so it makes good moral sense to try to support them since we in the developed world have responsibility for causing the problem in the first place.

Can planting trees really make a difference in climate breakdown? Isn’t it far better to lower emissions at source by reducing consumption than by trying to sequester carbon with trees that will ultimately die and release their absorbed C back to the atmosphere?

You can't answer this question in a sound bite.

With Treees and Climate Shop our aim is to sabotage the manufacture of new consumer items since these have the heaviest environmental impact. There is an enormous climatic impact whenever we buy new so when someone purchases that game controller you donated it means another new controller doesn't have to be made.

We use the cash we raise to plant fast-growing, carbon-ravenous trees. Yes, any carbon absorbed by a tree will ultimately flow back to the atmosphere but as long as the tree is alive that is one little bit of carbon that isn't part of the problem. The mangoes we plant can provide good food for Kenyan kids for 300 years — that's quite a long-term carbon lock-up. It can buy us some time to get those source emissions down. The Neem we plant yields termite-resistant construction timber so once the tree is cut down most of the absorbed carbon is retained in useful form as doors, window frames, and roofing joists. Yes, in time this material will also yield back its carbon to the air but Neem has antiseptic properties so can last for many years, even in the tropics.

There are no silver bullets out there to fix the climate. No perfect solutions. Planting trees, of itself, is not enough — but it would be foolish not to take advantage of the immense drawdown potential that trees give us, especially when you take into account their myriad collateral benefits to biodiversity, food production, employment creation, and more.

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