Christmas trees are gathered

By Adam Tobias of the Daily Times staff
Friday, January 12, 2007 10:53 PM CST

Watertown Street Department crews send discarded Christmas trees through a wood chipper Friday as part of their annual collection. (JOHN HART/Daily Times)

Those who live near the Street Department building on South Second Street may have noticed an evergreen fragrance coming from the property over the past couple weeks.

No, the city department hasn't started producing pine tree air fresheners or Pine-Sol cleaning products - that sweet smell is coming from old Christmas trees that are collected by street department crews and thrown into a wood chipper at the Second Street facility.

“It smells just like an air freshener you would buy at a local store,” Street Department Superintendent Rick Schultz said. “They have those pine tree air fresheners and that is exactly what it smells like. It is a nice smell - definitely better than rotten wood.”

In what is an annual occurrence, crews from the street department spend a good portion of January picking up dried-out Christmas trees that are left at the curb after the holiday season.

Schultz said the street department usually starts to see discarded trees a couple days after Christmas, but things really start to pick up after New Year's Day. He added pick-ups start to slow down after the third week in January, but that doesn't mean workers will not see Christmas trees left at the side of the road for the rest of the year.

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Schultz said crews from the street department are willing to gather Christmas trees on any day of the year.

“It isn't any different than if you would set out an evergreen tree,” he said.

From what Schultz could remember, the latest the street department has ever picked up a Christmas tree was right after the Fourth of July.

“It was pretty brown, but apparently somebody had it in their backyard for birds and then they set it out,” Schultz said. “It was pretty wicked looking.”

Schultz said he could not give the exact amount of how many discarded Christmas trees the street department collects each year, but he estimates the number is between 2,000 and 3,000. He added over the past few weeks he has noticed a lot more trees on the curb than in recent years.

“You can tell how everything is going by the Christmas trees on the curb,” Schultz said. “If the economy is bad you can kind of see the number of trees drop down and when the economy is good you see more trees out there.”

When the street department collects the trees some of them are placed in a wood chipper and others are stored at the city's compost site.

Schultz said the normal process usually involves workers driving around the city, loading the trees into trucks and bringing them back to the street department building where they will be put in a wood chipper. He added crews try to avoid taking the wood chipper out on routes because it causes more wear and tear on the machine, plus it takes more time out of the day to start and stop the chipper at each stop.

After the Christmas trees go through the wood chipper the remains are kept in a pile separate from other trees because the street department often gets requests for just evergreen wood chips, which are free of charge.

While it might sound like a couple thousand trees would produce a large quantity of wood chips, Schultz said it is rather shocking how small the amount is that one tree actually generates.

“When you chip a tree you think, ‘Boy you are going to get a lot of wood chips,' but really it is just a couple of handfuls,” Schultz said. “It is really not that much.”

Schultz said the department also gets numerous requests for the Christmas trees that are left and stored at the compost site.

“Some people put them in their backyards for birds and others use the wood for bonfires,” Schultz said. “We also had somebody call this year that took about 10 trees that were going to be used as a duck blind. We get many different requests for the trees.”

Tom Beyer, president of the Rock River Rescue Foundation, said this year marks the fifth year the organization will use old Christmas trees to provide spawning habitats and shelters for juvenile fish that are stocked in the Rock River.

Each year members of the foundation pick up about 100 trees that are left by the street department at the compost site and place them in the Rock River. Cinder blocks are attached to the middle of the trees so they sink to the bottom and lay on their sides.

Beyer said the organization can place as many as 100 trees in the river in a half a day and that this year the trees will probably be deposited in the river in either June or July.

The Rock River Rescue Foundation does have other methods to help increase the fish population, but Beyer said the use of Christmas trees is the cheapest and easiest process.

Beyer said that it is hard to measure what impact the trees have had on the fish population in the Rock River because the group does not get funding from the state Department of Natural Resources to do studies, but he thinks it is definitely helping.

“This is something though that other lake associations do and the DNR does these studies in more high profile bodies of water and they have found results with a great success rate,” Beyer said. “So it is something that does work.”

Schultz said he really has not received any weird requests for the trees but one instance that really sticks out in his mind is when the office received a call from a resident a couple of years ago who was the victim of a prank. The resident's entire front yard was littered with about 35 Christmas trees.

“He asked if we could come over and get rid of them and we did,” Schultz said. “Even though it was a prank he actually did us a favor because we didn't have to run around. We just stopped at the one house and chipped probably half our route.”

Although younger children are probably upset the area has not seen much snow this winter, Schultz said the milder temperatures have made it a lot easier to collect the Christmas trees. He added when there is snow on the ground it is a lot harder to pull the trees from the curb.

“With no snow on the ground it is no different than if we were to pick up trees during the summer,” he said.

Schultz said the street department workers do not have a set route when they collect the Christmas trees and the regular brush route is actually suspended from around the end of December to when the yard waste site opens in April.

The street department does not charge a fee to collect Christmas trees, but Schultz asks that residents make sure that all trees are free of stands, ornaments and lights.