How To Recycle Your Christmas Tree After The Holidays

When the glow of the holidays is fading, and pine needles begin to cover the floor, it’s time to re-purpose or recycle your Christmas tree, not trash it.

Roughly 27 million live Christmas trees are sold in the U.S. each year and many cities and towns offer curbside pick-up with the final destination a municipal mulching center instead of a landfill. Make sure that your Christmas tree is heading in the right direction because it’s an incredible waste of a great asset if it ends up buried in a landfill. If your community doesn’t offer curbside pickup for mulching or recycling, and if you can’t drive the tree to a local composting center, here are a few ideas on how to re-purpose your Christmas tree in your own backyard.

Recycling your Christmas tree as mulch and other garden uses

Make a wildlife habitat

Even if you live on a small property, you can place your former Christmas tree at the edge of your yard or garden to create a small wildlife habitat. Birds, rabbits, squirrels, and other small animals take shelter among the pine boughs during storms and cold weather, and some may even build nests there. Add an extra incentive for birds by sprinkling birdseed in and around the tree.

Protect tender plants

Pine boughs make excellent winter mulch for tender plants. Just cut the branches from the tree with loppers and lay them over the root zone of any tender plants for the duration of the winter. Pine boughs are also an excellent way to cover raised garden beds for the winter.

Winter mulch your garden

Ground or chipped pine needles, twigs, and branches make an excellent mulch for your garden. If you don’t have a wood chipper or shredder, use a hand pruner to cut the branches from the tree and scatter them where needed in your garden. The needles will eventually dry and fall off and work their way into the soil, helping to retain soil moisture. Pine needles also encourage the growth of mycorrhizal fungi, which assist your plants’ roots in taking up water and nutrients. When the branches of the boughs dry out, break them into small pieces and leave them lay as mulch or throw them in the compost pile.

Trunks and heavier branches of old Christmas trees can serve a multitude of other uses, like:

• decorative elements in your garden
• teepee for a bean trellis
• holding up row covers
• supports for large flowering plants
• the base for a new compost pile
• an erosion barrier to re-route or hold back water

Earth 911 has an excellent resource of tree recycling programs by zip code here.

Birds and fish can benefit from your Christmas tree

• Near Barrington, Illinois, the Heron Rookery at Baker’s Lake uses up to 400 recycled Christmas trees every year to attract Great Blue Herons, Black-Crowned Night Herons, Great Egrets, and Cormorants. The birds use the trees as nesting material.
• In many states and counties, the US Army Corps Of Engineers in association with local state agencies uses unsold and recycled Christmas trees to create habitat and shelter for fish in freshwater ponds and lakes. That’s an outstanding use of a natural resource that otherwise would have been wasted in a landfill. And of course, it makes local anglers really happy.