By Rachel Sawicki

With the biggest holiday of the year bringing joy and laughter, it also brings trash.

Wrapping paper, boxes, food scraps and decorations will flood Delaware’s recycling and trash facilities in the next few weeks, but one item that requires special disposal are Christmas trees.

DNREC Recycling Program manager Adam Schlachter said Christmas trees are classified as yard waste, which has been banned from landfills since 2008.

Delawareans have several options to recycle their Christmas trees. Some trash haulers like Waste Management offer free curbside pickup for a few weeks after Christmas. Newark is the only municipality in Delaware that offers a similar service. Every Monday at 7 a.m., trash crews will pick up any trees left on the curb through the last Friday in January at no extra cost and no scheduling is needed.

“We want to remind people that they should not be dropping these off at Delaware State Parks,” Mr. Schlachter said. “They definitely need to go to either the yard waste page to find the location that is available closest to them for dropping off their trees for recycling.”

He also notes that the trees must be bare, and they must be real.

“Make sure that you’ve taken everything off the tree,” Mr. Schlachter said. “They don’t want the ornaments, the lights, any of the fake snow, or the tinsel. If any of that stuff is still on, they’re just going to throw your tree away and it is not going to be recycled the way you want it to be.”

Delawareans can also bring their tree to one of several dropoff locations throughout the state, including transfer stations and landfill sites, which have a separate section for yard waste disposal. Trees may be accepted as soon as Sunday and as late as Jan. 28, but each facility has its own schedule.

“Organics like yard waste are a commodity that can be reused,” Mr. Schlachter said. “This was an effort to allow the market to take advantage of this source for material for recycling and reuse rather than putting it into the landfills where it will just sit there.”

Yard waste has a variety of reuses, like cover material in construction to help with erosion control or mulch cover in medians. At Cherry Island Landfill, yard waste is ground up and used for landscaping on side slopes and ground cover.

Mike Parkowski, chief of governmental affairs at Delaware Solid Waste Authority, said while Christmas trees do contribute a small boost to yard waste collection this time of year, it is nowhere near the volume they receive in the spring.

“I would say the Christmas tree volume is not even a quarter of the volume that comes in during the spring,” he said. “Not everybody gets a Christmas tree. A lot of people have fake trees. A lot of people don’t buy trees at all.”

However, since yard waste has been filtered out of general trash collection, Mr. Parkowski said 50,000 tons of material is saved from taking up landfill space every year.

Mr. Parkowski adds another alternative to throwing out Christmas trees is to plant them. If the root ball of the tree remains intact, it can become an addition to the backyard instead of the trash on the curb.

Mr. Schlachter said the volume of yard waste that is collected fluctuates depending on weather. Big storms and tornadoes that cause tree fall will generate more yard waste and overall yard waste collection is bigger during the spring, summer and fall when people are outside landscaping.

A full list of Christmas tree drop-off locations throughout the state can be found here.