By Dawn De Busk
When the holiday season passes, the Christmas tree – which once adorned homes and often forced owners to re-arrange furniture to make room for the annual evergreen – becomes an outdoor eyesore people want to get rid of.
The towns of Windham, Gray and New Gloucester each offer sites where residents can drop off their Christmas trees. At each site, drop-off times coincide with regular business hours, and there is no fee for the disposal of the trees.
As an alternative to disposing of trees in a town-owned brush pile or leaving them under the snow in the yard until spring thaw, people can prop up their old Christmas tree outside and sprinkle the branches with birdseed – providing an instant feeder and shelter for a variety of wintertime birds, according to Gilsland Farm Audubon Center in Falmouth.
For those preferring to rid themselves – and their yards – of that reminder of Christmas past, there are appropriate places in each community to drop off trees.
In Windham, residents have already been dropping off trees at the Public Works property located at 185 Windham Center Road, according to Public Works Director Doug Fortier. The Public Works facility is open Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., he said.
“Come in and see us. Someone will point out where to drop off the trees,” Fortier said.“Remember to undress your tree,” he said, adding tinsel and other ornaments can’t go through the chipper. The Public Works employees periodically put the trees
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through their chipper, and the mulch is used for erosion-control during road projects in the spring and summer, according to Fortier.
The town has provided a deadline date of Jan. 31 for ending its Christmas tree recycling program; and people who miss that date can dispose of trees through the leaf and brush disposal program held in the spring.
“Typically by the end of January, people have dropped them off. Usually within a month after Christmas passes, people have taken them out and disposed of them,” Fortier said.
In New Gloucester, residents have been bringing in between 30 and 40 Christmas trees a week, according to Keith Chase, an employee with the New Gloucester Transfer Station.
The transfer station is located at 264 Bald Hill Road, and the hours are Tuesday and Thursday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., Friday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Chase said.
He said each year, he sees people drop off trees during the months of January and February, but the first week of January is the busiest. Residents can get rid of former Christmas trees year-round since they go into the transfer station’s burn pile.
“Usually, I come in at 6 a.m. everyWednesday and burn them,” Chase said. He added it’s OK if New Gloucester residents don’t remove every strand of tinsel since that gets burned, too.
“Tinsel is fine. We always take the ornaments off if someone was in too much of a hurry to do that,” he said.
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Public Works employees prefer you leave a tree free of ornaments and tinsel when disposing of it. Courtesy photo |
At the town-owned Gray Transfer Station, Solid Waste Director Randy Cookson recommends residents remove all decorations before disposing of trees.
“The only thing we ask is: No lights, no tinsel and no stands, which, believe it or not, we get. People bring in fully decorated trees; and those are hard to go through the grinder,” Cookson said.
A Maine-based company uses a wood grinder to process all the wood at the transfer station – and that business takes the chips, he said. They grind both natural brush and treated wood from demolition projects – although those are done in separate loads. The demolition wood-chips go as fuel to power plants or to make chipboard in Canada, he said.
Residents who bring by Christmas trees frequently tell employees “they’re glad they have a place to get rid of them,” Cookson said.
Although the tree-disposal service is
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free at the Gray Transfer Station, they do accept donations that support the Gray Food Pantry.
So far, about 200 trees have been dropped off, he said, adding there’s a considerable percentage of the population that opts for a live tree over an artificial one.
“Some people put them out for the birds to nest in during the winter. When spring comes around they dispose of them,” Cookson said.
According to NewsOK.com, the owner of an Oklahoma City nursery and greenhouse has created the bird-feeder tree.
To turn Christmas trees into a haven and buffet for birds, the web site offers some advice: “Besides peanut butter pinecones, you can put apple and orange slices, or popcorn and cranberry strings on the tree.”
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