Capitol Hill residents have few options for tree disposal and depending on the size of your dead tree, you may need to trim it up first. Whatever happened to the Boy Scout holiday greens pickup brigade?
Curbside pickup. This free option is available only to current subscribers of the food and yard waste curbside pickup program. No food and yard waste cart at your residence? Then there’s no free pickup. If you live in a multi-family residence which has a yard waste pickup cart, they’ll pick up one tree for each yard waste cart. That’s one for one, kids. Get your tree out early and call dibs.
Prep your tree for curbside pickup by cutting trees into sections with a maximum length of 6 feet and trim branches to a maximum of 4 feet. Your personal green giant must be able to fit in the truck.
Free drop off. Seattle Public Utilities offers free tree recycling at their Fremont and their South locations. You can bring up to 3 trees at a time, so if you are already going help a neighbor and take theirs, too. Prep your tree for drop off by cutting into sections 8 feet of shorter. Additionally, the trunk diameter must be 4 inches or smaller.
SPU also reminds us of The Things Which Are Not Trees: Plastic trees, flocked, tinseled, or ornamented trees. Only natural, nudist trees qualify for either of the recycle programs. The programs end January 9th.
In a new (to me) recycling option, you can now recycle holiday light strings. The holiday light string drop off points are at several locations off-hill, with the closest being the Whole Foods Market at Denny and Westlake. See more in-city holiday light recycling locations here.
More information on tree recycling is available at the Seattle Public Utilities and at the King County Solid Waste Division websites.
Every year at this time some people dump their tree on the parking strip, even though their residence does not have food/yard waste pickup, and I guess they think that some “Christmas tree fairy” will swoop in and magically take away their tree. These are probably the same people who illegally dump their unwanted stuff, including large items like sofas, on the sidewalk and expect someone else to take care of it.
The SPU policy of picking up only one tree per yard`waste cart is not helping…that’s fine for single family homes, but not for apartments which have (at most) one of these carts. So if more than one unit in that building has a tree, they’re out of luck. Perhaps the other cut-up trees can simply be put inside the cart?
Have a little responsibility!…it doesn’t take much to learn what you can and cannot do.
So, nowhere on Capitol Hill where a tree can be dropped off for recycle/compost? Let us know if there is.