You hung your stockings by the chimney with care, and now they're part of the mess that's everywhere.
St. Albert residents will have plenty to do this weekend as they sweep up the scraps of their Christmas celebrations. Trash collectors typically see up to three times as many recyclables at the curb after Christmas, according to Ever Green Ecological Services officials, plus plenty of old, discarded trees.
Residents will be able to leave their Christmas trees on the curb with their garbage for collection from Jan. 10 to 21, said city environmental co-ordinator Meghan Myers, or at the recycling depot. All trees will be collected and composted. She reminded residents not to wrap those trees in plastic and to remove all decorations before setting them on the curb.
Make less waste
There are plenty of ways you can make life easier for trash collectors and the environment, says city environmental manager Leah Jackson. "Christmas is a great time to reuse," she notes. Try using old newspapers or cloth bags to reduce the amount of waste that comes with your gifts, and remember to save your bows and ribbons. "We have bows that are 10 years old in our box and just get reused every year."
Any unsoiled paper and any plastics with recycling symbols on them can go in the blue bag, Jackson says. "The thing we don't want to see are things made of foil-like products," she adds, such as metallic paper or garlands. Put Styrofoam, thin plastic films and glass ornaments in the trash; those aren't accepted under the curbside program.
"The biggest problem that these guys who are picking up [the trash] have is when people leave these big huge boxes there that aren't broken apart," Jackson says. Any cardboard should be stomped and tied into a one- by one-metre square placed under the blue bag so it fits into the collector truck. "You can put out as many blue bags as you want, so try and recycle as much as you can."
Check your receipts as well. Some stores have responsible packaging policies, Jackson notes, and will recycle any packaging that comes from products in their store — even Styrofoam. Some stores, such as Home Depot, will also accept hazardous waste such as dead batteries from that new toy you got for the kid (or yourself).
Backyard composters can handle almost all your leftover vegetables and sugary desserts, says Michael Kalmanovitch, who runs four composters at Earth's General Store in Edmonton. Most composters are big enough to handle a whole winter's worth of waste, so don't worry about filling them up. Letting the waste food freeze and thaw over the winter actually helps decay in the spring by breaking up cellulose, he notes.
Meat, dairy and bone should stay out of the composter, Kalmanovitch says, as they attract animals. These should go in an indoor composter sprinkled with a substance called bokashi instead. "It looks almost like a bran flake," he says, and contains a mix of molasses and bacteria. Those bacteria liquefy your leftovers with little to no smell — you can drain the results or use them as fertilizer.
Speaking of leftovers, he adds, try not to cook too much in order to reduce your waste. Anything you don't eat should be frozen for later, otherwise you'll probably get sick of it. Just don't forget that it's sitting in the freezer, he adds. "Otherwise, you're just delaying it going into the composter or the garbage."
Call Myers at 780-459-1735 for more on Christmas clean-ups.
