Treecycling

You may not want to think about putting away the Christmas decorations just yet, but the time is near. If you chose a live Christmas tree, you can green up your cleaning up as the St. Louis Forestry Department is making it a green one by offering FREE tree recycling at three locations for city residents.

Christmas tree recycling or treecycling allows for your live Christmas tree to live another life as mulch for landscaping or chips for hiking trails or playgrounds. Recycling is a much greener option than merely dumping your tree. After all, shouldn’t something as wonderful as a tree get to be reused? If the tree ends up in a landfill, it will degrade slowly if there’s not enough oxygen present. While that’s still a better option than PVC (artificial) trees, mother nature would get a kick out of you starting the new year with treecycling.

Trees can be dropped off at:

St. Louis City: Drop off trees anytime at any one of these three park locations from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.:

• Forest Park, Lower Muny Opera parking lot
• O’Fallon Park, West Florissant and Holly, picnic grounds #4
• Carondelet Park, Grand and Holly Hills, area between gate & recycling containers

St. Louis County • The county advises residents without residential yard waste pickup to take their trees to one of four commercial locations at a charge of $1:

• ORMI Fort Bellefontaine Compost, 13060 County Park Road (Monday through Saturday, 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.)
• Route 66 Landscape Supply Center, 18900 Franklin Road (weekdays, 7 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; Saturday, 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.)
• St. Louis Composting, 39 Old Elam Avenue in Valley Park (weekdays, 7 a.m. to 5 p.m.) or 11294 Schaeffer Road in Maryland Heights (weekdays, 6 a.m. to 4 p.m.)

Trees will be accepted at these park sites until Jan. 10th, 2014.  Please make sure that the tree are free of ALL decorations. Remove the ornaments, tinsel, lights, and tree stand.  Do NOT put the tree in a plastic bag or cover it. Wreaths and pine roping are not accepted at the sites.

The trees will be ground into mulch and will be available for free at these same locations to all St. Louis residents.

City residents should NOT place Christmas trees in ally dumpsters.  The Refuse Division will collect them as part of its regular monthly bulk pickup program.