THE Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust, has renewed its tree planting partnership with fuel business Exelby Services.

Now in its second year, the agreement between Exelby and the Clapham based charity has already seen 850 trees planted and 170 young people helped to connect with nature and learn new skills.

Exelby Services is a family owned, independent distributor of bunkering and retails fuels across the North of England. Comprising of five service areas and truck stops, they handle more than 140 million litres of fuel a year and provide overnight parking for up to 350 HGVs per day.

Rob Exelby, managing director of Exelby Services, said: “We’re immensely proud to be partnering with YDMT as we push to reduce our environmental impact as a business while creating opportunities to support young people in the British countryside.

Michael Devlin, deputy chief executive officer at YDMT added: “Through our ‘Together for Trees’ campaign we are working with many supporters and partners such as Exelby Services to plant 100,000 additional trees across the region. Trees are hugely valuable as a habitat for wildlife supporting some of our most endangered woodland animals, like red squirrels, dormice and cuckoos.

“They are also important for our mental health and wellbeing and we believe that everyone should have access to them. The appeal aims to raise funds to create beautiful woodlands that everyone can enjoy for years to come.”

He added: “We’re really excited to continue our partnership with Exelby Services as one of our charity partners and we’ll be excited to welcome them to the woodlands they’re supporting later in the year.”

Mr Exelby added: “As well as reducing our customer’s carbon footprints, we’re now on a mission to make our business operations carbon neutral. We have recently completed a full redevelopment of our A19 Northbound site which includes a Shell service station and truck stop.

“We’ve taken inspiration from our partnership with YDMT to plant more than a hundred trees and hundreds more shrubs and bushes to create a diverse habitat for the local wildlife. We’re looking to supplement this with an on-site solar farm to make it our first carbon negative service area.”