Taking out the holiday trash? Advice experts want you to know
ST. PAUL, Minn. — The first weekend of the New Year is perhaps the most common for tossing holiday trash, be it a Christmas tree, string lights, or other waste that's piled up over the past month.
The EPA says Americans generate on average 25 percent more waste during the holiday season, and all of that trash has to go somewhere.
Unfortunately, it gets mishandled and misplaced more than you might think.
"Holiday season is a time when a lot of us are buying more, consuming more, which leads to a lot more waste," said Andrea McKennan, Ramsey County's Environmental Health Supervisor. "People to figure out how to manage."
It's estimated that Americans purchase, put up, and throw out more than 25 million Christmas trees each year – thousands alone in Minnesota.
Instead of putting them in the trash, McKennan urges everyone in the county to take them to one of the several yard waste sites open on the weekend during the winter.
"If you put your tree in the trash, that's the end of its life, of what use we can get out of it," she said. "If you take your tree to a yard waste facility, what they'll do with it is grind it up, turn it into mulch, then it has more life ahead of it, serving that purpose."
Another common trash mistake – string lights. Almost every year, Mckennan says, they end up in residents' recycling.
While it's well-intentioned, the lights end up tangling in county recycling machines, causing more harm than good.
"Waste in general is this system that we're all a part of, but a lot of us don't think about it very much," Mckennan said. "We say 'throw it away', but what is 'away'? It's a fascinating system where there's a lot of people working behind the scenes to try and help protect our environment and conserve resources."
You can find a full list of open yard waste sites in Ramsey County here
