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Sedgwick County Offers Christmas Tree Recycling Services

Stephen Koranda
/
Kansas Public Radio
A Christmas tree in the Kansas Statehouse.

Sedgwick County is offering its Christmas tree recycling program at locations in 13 cities around the county.

If you had a fresh cut tree this holiday, consider recycling it instead of putting it out for trash pick-up.

Tree drop-off locations are available in Wichita and 12 other cities including Derby, Maize and Goddard.

Sedgwick County Environmental Resources Director Susan Erlenwein says the upside to recycling a tree is free mulch.

"These sites are where people can bring the Christmas tree when they are done with them, drop them off and our Parks Department comes by with the grinder—chips them up—and the chips are then available for free for anybody to pick up," she says.

Erlenwein says the locations are set up as drop-off sites and are marked with signs and barricades. The locations are not managed or monitored because she says staffing would be too expensive. She says so far, illegal dumping has not been a problem.

Some cities in Sedgwick County provide their own tree recycling services, so they are not listed in the county program.

Erlenwein has a reminder for anyone who will be using the tree recycling program: “We request that people try to remember to take the bulbs and lights off of the trees. You’d be surprised how many we get with the bulbs and lights still on them.”

The tree recycling locations will be open until January 23.

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Follow Deborah Shaar on Twitter @deborahshaar

 
To contact KMUW News or to send in a news tip, reach us at news@kmuw.org.

 

Deborah joined the news team at KMUW in September 2014 as a news reporter. She spent more than a dozen years working in news at both public and commercial radio and television stations in Ohio, West Virginia and Detroit, Michigan. Before relocating to Wichita in 2013, Deborah taught news and broadcasting classes at Tarrant County College in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas area.