COUNTYWIDE : 50,000 Christmas Trees Are Recycled

Ventura County’s first Christmas Tree Recycling Program collected nearly 50,000 trees, more than half those tossed out by county residents after the holidays, officials said Tuesday.

By providing curbside collection or local drop-off sites, the countywide campaign diverted about 435 tons of material from area landfills, said Victoria Hand, recycling coordinator with the county Solid Waste Management Department.

An estimated 90,000 cut evergreen trees are disposed of each year in the county. A total of 49,675 trees were recycled into wood chips, Hand said.

The recycling program officially ended Jan. 16, but it took several weeks to count all the trees collected from 10 cities and unincorporated areas, Hand said.

Simi Valley collected 14,000 trees, which amounted to 122 1/2 tons of recycled material.

Other totals include: 11,500 trees from Thousand Oaks, 10,944 from Oxnard, 4,838 from Ventura, 2,632 from Moorpark, 2,272 from Camarillo, 857 from Channel Island Beach community, 800 from Fillmore, 735 from Santa Paula, 397 from Ojai, 350 from Oak Park and 350 from Port Hueneme.

Becky Radonich, Camarillo’s recycling coordinator, said this was the first year that the city has offered curbside collection or a drop-off center for Christmas trees.

While the cities of Thousand Oaks, Fillmore and Santa Paula chipped their own trees, other shredding was done by Bailard and Simi Valley landfills, Southern California Edison and Bob’s Tree Service.

Gary Haden, solid waste superintendent of the Ventura Regional Sanitation District, said after the trees that were turned in at Bailard Landfill were shredded, they took up only one-fourth the space.

Still, “it was a pretty impressive pile,” Haden said. The material was offered to the public at no charge, but few people took advantage of it, he said.