Christmas has passed and it’s time for un-decorating! Putting your tree out to the curb with your trash isn’t the right move for our environment though.

Trees, like all other organic waste require air to decompose. Landfills unfortunately deprive organic waste of the air needed for decomposition because the waste in landfills is tightly compacted and essentially entombed.

Under these anaerobic conditions, instead of breaking down and becoming soil, organic material breaks down anaerobically, which releases methane gas.

This is why modern landfills are peppered with vents - the vents release the methane into our atmosphere as opposed to methane building up and causing a potentially explosive situation.  Unfortunately methane is one of the worst greenhouse gasses: over a 20 year period, methane has a warming potential over 80 times worse than CO2.

We don’t want to send our yard waste to the landfill for the same reasons we don’t want to send our food waste there.

So what can you do instead?

The Cuyahoga County Solid Waste District’s Recycling site offers the following suggestions for sustainably disposing of your tree:

  1. Take your tree to one of the seven yard waste compost facilities open to the public and listed here

  2. Drop your tree off to one of two local farms that will reuse it for animal feed:

Parma Area Historical Society at Stearns Homestead

Kelly’s Working Well Farm

16495 S. Franklin Street Chagrin Falls, OH 44023 (Phone 440-823-5779)

Lake County Metroparks collects Christmas trees for recycling through mid January at 15 different sites throughout its park system. Click here for details. Lake County Metroparks then chips the trees and the chips are composted or used as mulch in the parks.

If you’d like to see a similar program in place in our Cleveland Metropark system please email [email protected], call 216-635-3200 or tweet @clevemetroparks to make this request.

Are you aware of other means of sustainably disposing of Christmas Trees that we can pass along to our neighbors? Please email them to us at [email protected]

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