Name: How Las Vegas recycles Christmas trees into community resources
Uploaded: 2025-12-30T03:09:00.229Z
Duration: 2 min 34 s
Description: From holiday centerpiece to community resource! See how Las Vegas turns Christmas trees into garden mulch and supports local nonprofits.

From holiday centerpiece to community resource! See how Las Vegas turns Christmas trees into garden mulch and supports local nonprofits.

Las Vegas

Las Vegas offers residents several drop-off locations to recycle real Christmas trees, which are chipped into mulch for use in landscapes and school gardens. This effort helps reduce landfill waste and supports water conservation and dust control in the community.

Artificial trees can also be donated to the Magical Forest, a fundraiser for Opportunity Village, where they are reused as decorations. The program accepts trees of all sizes and conditions, with collection points open for real trees until January 15th and for artificial trees until January 9th.

How Las Vegas recycles Christmas trees into community resources

The holidays aren't wrapping up and it'll soon be time to bring in the outdoor Christmas decorations and deal with the indoor ones for your Christmas tree. There's a sustainable way to do that. This is a spot we've always come to drop the trees off. Carolyn and her son Anthony took advantage of one of the dozens of drop off locations across the valley. This one at Desert Breeze Park. When we found out we was able to bring the trees here and they could recycle them. We've been doing it ever since. Yeah, that's easier to. Yeah, it's so much easier to try and call someone, find someone, leave it out for the trash, anything like that's crazy. Convenient and easy, whether you leave your decorations up through New Year's or take them down right away. So two days after Christmas, we pull everything down, put everything away, basically clean up the house, get the tree out and then start to kind of like getting ready for the new year to bring in everything. And we try and knock it out pretty quick. Mine, the day after I take every day, all the gifts gone, time for the tree to go. You know, recycling your Christmas trees is a great thing to do during the holidays because it is a time when we generate a lot more waste. Once collected, all these trees will be chipped and turned into mulch. And that mulch is used in landscapes and in school gardens, and it helps to control dust and to conserve water. It can make a big difference. When you throw your tree in the landfill, it decomposes super slow in the tomb that is a landfill, and as it decomposes, it creates methane. We definitely want to keep organic material out of the landfill, especially trees, because the beneficial use is there. But if you don't have a real tree to recycle and want to get rid of your artificial Christmas tree, there's an option for you to here at Magical Forest. These trees really help us replenish the ones that we have to change out anything that, you know, has had better days. Just keep everything looking festive for the holidays. The Las Vegas holiday staple has been around for more than 30 years as the biggest fundraiser for nonprofit Opportunity Village. All the money raised helps provide day habilitation, job training, fine and performing arts, anything you can dream of. We pretty much take care of here at Opportunity Village for anybody living with an intellectual developmental disability. They take your old tree to be decorated by our community like the ones you see here. So any tree of all size is amazing. Flocked, not flocked. I know a lot of people get worried. Oh, no, the lights are broken. That's great. We take broken lights, too. We'll just rewrap them. You can drop off your artificial tree now through January 9th, and you might even find it repurposed into something special next year. For real trees, collection points throughout the valley are open now through January 15th. Reporting in Las Vegas, I'm Geneva Zoltec.

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