As much as some of us loving having a real Christmas tree in our house for the holiday season we need to remember that recycling those trees afterwards is something we should all be doing.
With so many trees cut down each year around the holidays, we must take the time to dispose of them responsibly.
Every year between 25 and 30 million real pine trees are used for Christmas celebrations. It is not easy to determine how many of those 25 to 30 million are being recycled though.
This is because local recycling programs generally don’t report their numbers to the public.
Read more: The Art Of Recycling Christmas Trees
Some cities across America are better at recycling trees than others. For the past 27 years San Francisco residents have recycled their Christmas trees.
Each year outside of San Francisco’s City Hall, almost 600 tons worth of trees are put into a wood chipper that turns them into mulch. The Parks Department and Sanitation Department of New York City collect and mulch approximately 150,000 trees per year.
That mulch is then put to good use in the city’s parks gardens and public fields. The city then holds events where New Yorkers can walk away with a bag of mulch to take home.
The Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree has been donated to Habitat for Humanity after the holiday season for the past seven years. In a suburb of New Orleans, recycled Christmas trees are used to prevent land erosion.
Rather than being disposed of as trash, trees are put in wooden cribs containing shallow water and the trees work to absorb the wave impact into the surrounding land. In Shawnee, Kansas between 100 and 150 Christmas trees are turned into habitats for the local fish.
Recycling Christmas trees is easy to do and helps us do our part to give back to planet Earth. With so many options for recycling no one has any excuse to just throw away their Christmas tree.
Even fake Christmas trees that a person no longer wants can and should be recycled. Polygroup is a Walmart supplier that every year sends artificial trees, along with their electric cords and lights to China. There they are recycled at a plant by being broken down and reused in other products.
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With so many outlets for recycling Christmas trees, there is absolutely no excuse not to do so. If we are going to continue to go through millions of trees every year we have an obligation to make sure those trees are used again in whatever way they can be.
Our Christmas celebrations should not come at the expense of our environment and the world that we live in.