Recycling Christmas Trees

Environmentalists are hoping people’s Christmas trees end up in parks or gardens after the holidays, rather than the dump. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Erin Toner reports:

Transcript

Environmentalists are hoping peoples’ Christmas trees end up in parks or
gardens after the holidays, rather than the dump. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Erin Toner reports:


According to the National Christmas Tree Association, between 25 and
30 million real Christmas trees are sold in the U.S. every year, and the
majority of those trees are recycled after the holidays.


Jim Corliss is with the National Christmas Tree Association. He says the
group made a big recycling push about 15 years ago.


“We gave a recycling award each year to a municipality or entity which
did a good job of recycling Christmas trees, and according to our surveys
that we did as the years went by we raised the number of recycled trees
in this country from somewhere in the 30 to up to the 70 percentile.”


Corliss says municipalities use wood chips from Christmas trees on park
pathways, in planters or sell the chips as compost.


For the GLRC, I’m Erin Toner.

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