The City of Charlottetown has hundreds of new trees today.
Nine local businesses, city staff and more than 50 volunteers planted roughly 360 trees last Thursday after an environmental initiative to offset annual paper usage of those participating businesses.
Trees were planted at Upton Farmlands, adding to the existing Confederation Forest that was initiated by the Macphail Woods Ecological Forestry Project in 2014.
The Business Tree Planting Challenge was initiated by McInnes Cooper’s Charlottetown office in 2014.
“It is so impressive to see three times the participation from Charlottetown businesses this year over last year,” said Mayor Clifford Lee. “This proves that the business community is aware of their impacts on the environment and is working to minimize their footprint.”
To calculate the approximate number of trees needed to make up for the amount of paper each business was using in a typical year, the city used an equation by Conservatree.org, based on one tree producing 8,333 sheets of paper.
Cost of the trees — native species ordered from the J. Frank Gaudet Nursery — was covered by the participating businesses, which included: Fitzpatrick and Co., Invesco, Kent Street Market, Delta Hotels by Marriott Prince Edward, Upstreet Craft Brewing, Rodd Hotels and Resorts, SableArc Studios, MRSB Group and P.E.I. Federation of Agriculture.
