Disposing Christmas Trees the Green Way
The city’s commitment to a recycling program
By Frank Dutan
By the time Dec 26 has rolled around, the frantic preparations and celebrations of Christmas are over. Even though the holiday season still continued to include New Years, those who bought those fresh evergreen Christmas trees from street vendors were usually clueless about how best to dispose of the trees and the city was burdened with piles of discarded trees blocking sidewalks.
Luckily, in New York City, a lot of information is available about recycling on the city’s Department of Sanitation (DSNY) Website, where the claim is made that “NYC has the largest, most ambitious recycling program in the nation”, which according to the Website, the city instituted in 1995 its Christmas Tree Recycling Program. City residents have learned that with the trees, if not properly disposed and left unattended for an extended period, they begin to fall apart, with mounds of fallen pine leaves accumulating at the base and an awful stench of rotting vegetation permeating any enclosed space.
For this Christmas tree season, from Jan 4, 2010 to Jan 15 2010, city residents could place their Christmas trees, after removing tree stands, tinsel, lights, ornaments, and other decorations, on the curb outside of their apartment building or house. The city wants to make sure that all trees can be recycled and be of benefit to the city. DSNY regulations state that if when trees are discarded and still have decorations attached, that since most decorations cannot be recycled, that the tree would be thrown into a landfill with other garbage and not reduced to chips. But, for those Christmas trees to be recycled, they are fed into a mobile processor, which reduces them to mulch for parks, playing fields, and community gardens throughout the city. And, about this time of the year, the city holds its NYC Parks & Recreation Mulchfest, which allowed New Yorkers to participate by bringing their trees to designated sites throughout the five boroughs, which took place on Jan 9 and 10 from 10am to 2pm and for those who wanted, free mulch was available.
One famous tree, the 76-foot-tall Norway spruce, the city’s pre-eminent Christmas tree, which adorned Rockefeller Center, like its smaller cousins, is also recycled. At the end of the Christmas season, when the tree is taken down on Jan 7, it is donated to the non-profit organization Habitat for Humanity, which specializes in building “simple”, “decent” and “affordable housing” for low income people. According to the organization’s Website, the 2008 Rockefeller Center Christmas tree was milled into lumber, was used as shelving, and is now part of 41 homes that were built last year in the Ocean Hill section of Brownsville in Brooklyn, New York. Contacted for plans for the 2009 tree, Habitat for Humanity said that the tree would be milled for a home for Iveth Bowie and her four children who live in Connecticut, incorporating the entire tree into the walls.
In a press release issued last year the DSNY announced that the Christmas Tree Recycling Program managed to collect over 166,638 trees and the Mulchfest brought in 13,137 trees. The number of trees collected in the Mulchfest this year show an increase over the 11,000 collected from the previous year. According to the DSNY, this increase means that city residents have become more aware of the need for recycling and have become more active participants, especially with the city facing serious economic problems; the mulch from the trees relieves one expense, organic fertilization for trees in parks citywide.
