Bettys looking to fill special role

YORKSHIRE tea and coffee maker Bettys & Taylors has created a unique new role to spearhead its environmental work.

The Harrogate company is looking to recruite a Trees for Life manager following a pledge made by chairman Jonathan Wild on children's TV programme Blue Peter.

After Blue Peter presenter Zoe Salmon, helped by Mr Wild's son Daniel, planted the three millionth tree as part of the firm's green appeal, Mr Wild told viewers that Bettys & Taylors was now going to focus not simply on planting trees but on saving them too.

The company, famous for Yorkshire Tea, Taylors coffees and Bettys tea shops, launched its Trees for Life appeal 17 years ago and has helped plant more than three million trees since then.

Now it wants to focus efforts on saving trees in the Amazonian rain forests and has launched a nationwide search to find an "exceptional person" to spearhead the new campaign.

After the three millionth tree was planted by Blue Peter at the new Trees for Life Wood at RHS Garden, Harlow Carr, near Harrogate, Mr Wild pledged to begin this pioneering new chapter of Trees for Life by saving one million trees in the Amazonian rainforests – an area roughly equal to the size of Yorkshire.

"Having made that very public pledge, our real work now begins in earnest and we are searching for an exceptional person with great vision and energy to help us make a real difference to the world. We are talking to all the agencies working on protecting rainforests and we need help to select a project partner and the ideal project," he said.

Bettys & Taylors was founded in Harrogate 80 years ago by Mr Wild's great uncle, a Swiss immigrant, and now has sales of more than £60m a year.

The Trees for Life manager will find new ways to encourage even more support from Yorkshire Tea drinkers and seek out like-minded businesses to join forces with Bettys & Taylors, so that far more than a million trees can be saved.

Part of the job will also be educational: working with schools, the Women's Institute and local community groups to explain how trees provide fuel, animal fodder, building materials and food for people in developing countries.

Applicants are likely to have three to four years' experience working for a relevant charity or non-governmental organisation (NGO), probably in a marketing or public relations capacity.

The role will encompass writing for the media and for the Trees for Life website, and broadcasting the work of the appeal on radio and television.

Trees for Life was conceived in 1990 after Jonathan's young children, Chloe and Daniel, were moved by a Blue Peter programme on deforestation to ask their father how they could help 'make the world better.'

He promised that if his children found the means to plant one tree, he would find a way of planting 999,999 more by the millennium.

Bettys & Taylors committed to donating £100,000 a year to tree planting and asked its customers to support the appeal by saving tokens on boxes of Yorkshire Tea. By 2000, the first million trees had been planted in Ethiopia and local children celebrated with Chloe and Daniel by planting the one millionth tree on Harrogate Stray.

In 2001, Bettys & Taylors teamed up with Oxfam and thanks largely to a special Yorkshire Tea promotion, another million trees were planted in just one year.

This time, Prince Charles came to Harrogate to plant the two millionth tree on the Stray.

Since then, the firm's passion for trees has grown and grown – working with Oxfam as well as the Woodland Trust, the Women's Institute and the

Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust to plant trees in Ethiopia, India, the Yorkshire Dales and now at the Trees for Life Wood, RHS Garden Harlow Carr.

The Trees for Life Wood, currently being cleared by pigs the old-fashioned way, celebrates Bettys & Taylors recent Queen's Award for Sustainable

Development and will demonstrate to visitors and schoolchildren why trees are one of the world's most valuable resources.