Boulder County residents can avoid sending Christmas trees, other leftover holiday items to landfills

Many Boulder County residents will once again have an annual post-Christmas opportunity to take their holiday trees to tree-recycling collection locations provided by their local governments or solid waste haulers.

In Longmont alone, the city collected 2,937 trees at its Waste Diversion Center and satellite drop-off locations during last year's holiday season, said Charles Kamenides, the city's sanitation manager. In the 2015 holiday season, Longmont collected 2,581 trees at those sites.

Kamenides said most of the trees dropped off by Longmont residents are ground up and used to make mulch, but about 150 or so will be used by the city's Natural Resources Division to add fish habitat at Golden Ponds and McCall Lake.

Erie's annual Christmas tree recycling program will begin Tuesday, according to the town's newsletter. Residents can drop off trees at Coal Creek Park at the intersection of Cheesman and Kattell streets, in a designated drop-off area located in the north parking lot Erie will only be accepting Christmas trees for recycling through Jan. 14, according to the town's November/December newsletter.

In Lafayette, Christmas trees can be dropped off at the City Service Center, 1700 Avalon Ave., from 6 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Mondays through Fridays between today and Feb. 2, and from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Jan. 27, according to the city's website. The Service Center will be closed, however, on New Year's Day and on Jan. 15 for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

Longmont is providing four sites for residents to drop off their Christmas trees from Tuesday through Jan. 7: the Roosevelt Park parking lot south of Eighth Avenue; the west side of the 18th Avenue parking lot at Garden Acres Park's baseball park; the South Pratt Parkway parking lot at Kanemoto Park and the east Alpine Street parking lot at Centennial Park.

Superior's Yard Waste Recycling Facility at 2125 Honey Creek Lane is open year-around for grass clippings, small branches and other organic yard material, from 4 a.m. to 7 p.m. Wednesdays, 8 a.m to noon and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays and 8 a.m. to noon and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays. Town officials said the site will be open during the holiday season for Christmas tree recycling.

Residents of Boulder and other parts of Boulder County can drop trees off at Western Disposal Services' Yard Waste Center, 5880 Butte Mill Road, which is open from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays and 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays. For residents with Western's curbside composting service, Western Disposal will pick up and compost trees placed by those residents' compost bins on pickup days.

Local officials advise their residents to remove all ornaments, tinsel., light strands, decorations, nails, beads, screws, and tree stands from those Christmas trees before dropping them off for recycling.

In addition to those Christmas tree recycling locations, Boulder County residents can arrange the recycling of certain "holiday leftovers" — as they're called by the nonprofit recycling agency Eco-cycle — items ranging from cooking oil to wrapping paper to holiday cards to cardboard boxes to paper shopping bags.

Longmont, for example, in addition to its Christmas tree recycling program, Longmont is once again offering residents the opportunity to bring their wrapping paper, holiday light strands, and white Styrofoam blocks to the Waste Diversion Center, 140 Martin St., to drop those items off there for recycling between Tuesday and Jan. 31. There will be specially designated bins for recycling specific materials.

Longmont city officials advise people not to put holiday wrapping paper in their curbside recycling containers because it is considered a contaminant in the single-stream recycling process due to its high clay and low fiber content. Wrapping paper should be kept separate from all other recyclables and there will be a special bin at the Waste Diversion Center for that paper.

Longmont officials also advise residents not to include metallic wrapping paper, ribbons, bows, ornaments, tissue paper, fluorescent or dark paper or paper covered in tape in the bins for dropping off wrapping paper, since those items are not recyclable. However, tissue paper, fluorescent paper and dark paper can be composted at the Waste Diversion Center or in participating solid waste collection customers' composting carts,

No-longer-operating holiday lights and light strands can be recycled by taking them to locations where they can be deposited, such as Longmont's Waste Diversion Center. People should wrap each string of lights into a ball and drop them in the appropriate marked container,

Used cooking oil can also be brought to Longmont's Waste Diversion Center for proper disposal. Longmont can take white-foam block and peanut Styrofoam material to the Diversion Center and drop them in special collection containers there.

Kamenides said Longmont typically collects about eight tons of wrapping paper, about 500 pounds of holiday light strands during the holiday period, as well as two 30 cubic-yard roll-off containers of Styrofoam per week during that period.

"It's quite a lot," Kamenides said of Longmont's holiday-season collections of trees and recyclable items.

But "there are markets for things like cardboard," Kamenides said, and the recycling of such items helps local governments and their constituents "reduce what we are landfilling."

Marti Matsch, Eco-Cycle's deputy director, said that "we really see surges, around the holidays," of her agency's collections of recyclable items dropped off at locations such as the Boulder County Recycling Center, 1901 63rd St., the Bounty Hazardous Materials Management Facility at 1901 63rd St., Eco-Cycle's and the city of Boulder's Center for Hard-to-Recycle Materials CHaRM center at 6400 Arapahoe Road and Longmont's Waste Diversion Center.

Fees are charged, in some instances, for dropping off some items.

Information about those drop-off locations, and what types of materials each will or will not accept, can be viewed on Eco-Cycle's latest annual holiday recycling guide — available through a link at tinyurl.com/y9xnh4qo — which also contains the agency's tips for how Boulder County residents can "Have a Zero Waste Holiday Season."

John Fryar: 303-684-5211, jfryar@times-call.com or twitter.com/jfryartc