Your Guide to Holiday Recycling

Your trash bags may feel a bit heavier because of all the holiday waste from the past week. We produce about 30% more waste during this season than we do the rest of the year. The joys of the season often comes with food scraps, discarded Styrofoam, and wads of wrapping paper. Thankfully, there are multiple outlets for our waste to make sure we aren’t filling up landfill in order to spread Christmas cheer.

Sometimes we end up with items that we don’t normally recycle at this time of year such as old electronics, live Christmas trees, or Styrofoam. The time to recycle these is at the annual “Bring One for the Chipper: Tree and Electronics Recycling Event.” Here you can drop off your live trees, electronics, Styrofoam, and cardboard for recycling all at once. If you found out you have some faulty Christmas lights, you can bring them here as well for recycling and give them a second life.

 If you are a gardener, you can even pick up some free seeds for your spring garden, courtesy of Home Depot, Ferry Morse, and Keep Georgia Beautiful. Everything is free though a $10.00 donation is appreciated if recycling computer or tv monitors.

You can visit Home Depot on 875 Shugart Road on January 3rd from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. They will not be wiping data from electronic devices so you will need to do that ahead of time if needed. All of the trees will be chipped by Whitfield County Public Works and turned into mulch that will be used around local parks. This event is possible thanks to Keep Dalton-Whitfield Beautiful, Whitfield County Public Works, Dalton-Whitfield Solid Waste Authority, and Overlooked Materials.

If you are unable to attend the event, trees can be disposed of at any convenience center except the Martin Luther King Jr. center and if you are in the city, you can schedule a brush pickup. Electronics can be recycled year-round at the Old Dixie Hwy. center though there is a charge for monitors. Cardboard is the easiest material as you can put it in with your regular recycling. Unfortunately, Styrofoam collection will be special to this event as it is being provided for by Overlooked Materials.

A good bit of our holiday waste is easily recycled in our curbside bins or at a convenience center. Wrapping paper is a classic recyclable in December but make sure the paper you put in your recycling bin isn’t metallic or glittery. You can also easily recycle the milk jugs, paperboard egg cartons, and paperboard food boxes from your cooking as you prepare feasts for the family. You can also throw your bi-metal cans, the ones used for vegetables and soups, in the recycling as well. Just make sure to give it a quick rinse first to keep out the pests. Lastly, if you are anything like me, you have a huge pile of cardboard from your present shopping in your home. Flatten those boxes and recycle them as well.

If you compost materials, the heavy and frequent holiday meals can lead to some extra material. Fruit and vegetable scraps can go in the composting bin as can live wreaths if you break them into smaller pieces. Tissue paper and napkins can also be added in as a good “brown” material meaning it is carbon-rich as it will break down quickly.

There are some items that do need to go in the trash but that we often see sneaking into the recycling. Milk and juice cartons cannot be recycled though they feel like paper. The packaging has a plastic liner that means that we can’t recycle it. Tinsel and garland also belong in the garbage and can even cause problems with the recycling center equipment if it gets tangled up so make sure those items go in your garbage bag.

Last year over 79,000 pounds was recycling in Daton curbside in December and 197 tons was recycled in the fourth quarter of last year at the convenience centers. The Bring One for the Chipper event recycled 65 trees and over 3,000 pounds of electronics and cardboard. Let’s see if we can beat these amounts this year!