Throughout the holidays, your lush, tinseled, and decked tree has served as a festive centerpiece. But soon its needles will begin falling and it won't look so merry.
Don't worry, though. Your tree could easily have a second life — and so could your artificial tree if it's seen a little too much holiday cheer. You just have to recycle or reuse them.
The whole idea here is to keep the trees — natural and artificial —out of landfills. Both contain recoverable materials, said Monroe County's director of environmental services Michael Garland.
"If it's a real tree, we can create wood chips," Garland said. "We can create mulch from that, return it to the earth. If it's an artificial tree, we can recover the metals and the plastics as well."
The simplest solution for a natural tree is to drag it out to the curb or take it to a drop-off site — in either case, do not bag it. Check with your local government to see whether curbside pick-up is an option or whether you need to haul your tree to a drop-off site. The county also has a rundown for each municipality on its website.
City residents can leave natural trees at the curb on their normal pickup days through the end of January. And the county will collect them at ecopark on Avion Drive in Chili.
You could also throw your increasingly skeletal evergreen to the birds. If you have space in your yard, the state Department of Environmental Conservation encourages you to use the tree as brush pile for our feathered friends. They say it'll give the birds extra shelter during the cold months to come. (And you get to watch them flit about.)
As for artificial trees, Garland said to bring those to ecopark on Wednesday afternoons or Saturday mornings.
"Through our partners WM and Sunnking, those materials, the metals and the plastics, will be recovered from those artificial trees," Garland said.
