To advocate for better treatment of the environment, SAVE Club hosted a Christmas tree recycling event at Franconia Park on January 7-8 where community members could donate their trees.
There are different ways people dispose of their Christmas trees every year.
Some of these methods include leaving their tree out with the trash or recycling them.
The SAVE club held an event where people could donate their Christmas trees to be recycled.
According to SAVE advisor Kim Wilson, the process of recycling Christmas trees is a more environmentally friendly method of getting rid of them rather than leaving the trees in landfills where they are not able to decompose.
“The worst thing to do is to put [a tree] out for the trash because if it goes in a landfill, it doesn’t really decompose,” Wilson said. “Landfills don’t decompose. They’re like a burial chamber for trash.”
The donated pine trees are turned into wood chips to be utilized in the township for projects in the community.
“The town is going to bring over a wood chipper, and then they’re going to wood chip all the trees and then we’re going to use them in a trail conservation,” freshman SAVE member Adelina Cutrona said.
According to Cutrona, the trees are immediately going to be recycled by the township.
Instead of the trees rotting, they are going toward something.
During the tree donation, community members dropped off approximately 400 trees, but trees were not the only things that were donated.
Monetary donations were also encouraged.
“We get a good amount of donations,” freshman SAVE member Tori Puente said. “We use them to further our funds.”
To get the community involved, SAVE promotes the tree recycling before the function.
“We posted [the event] on the Souderton area website, on our own account, and Franconia Park also has the dates on their sign and it’s been promoting the recycling program,” Puente said.
The recycling dates usually fall after Christmas break ends, which has been the main factor that has caused issues in the past due to the weather of that period.
“Last year we had to cancel one of the days because it got snowed out. But we still made it work. It was still successful,” SAVE Officer Bryan Wu said.
Wilson offers her students an extra credit opportunity if they drop off their trees during the SAVE tree recycling dates.
This helps with getting the community involved.
We do it every year, anyway, and I’ve had no problems with it,” community member Raymond Ace said.
The SAVE recycling-donation program has been going on for at least the last 20 years.
According to Wilson, even though SAVE does not advertise the event too much, people know about it since SAVE has “been doing it for so long.”
“We really appreciate the community support,” Wilson said.