‘Tis the season of gift giving, holiday cheer, and decorating. One of the most popular ways to decorate your home both inside and out is stringing Christmas lights. Each year, an estimated 150 million strands of tiny lights are sold in the United States. With the purchase of new lights comes the inevitable discarding of old ones. Christmas light sets that are broken or not lighting up properly tend to be tossed into the trash.
Every year, about 25% more waste is generated by American homes between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, this represents more than one million extra tons of trash every week. In addition to ribbon, packing material, Christmas trees, and holiday cards, this extra waste includes strands of damaged or non-working Christmas lights.
Discarded Christmas lights take up valuable space in our landfills each year. In addition, they can be toxic to the environment. While there are variations in how Christmas lights are manufactured, in tests many of them contain several hazardous materials including high levels of lead and bromine.
Manufacturers in the United States have been working to eliminate hazardous substances from their Christmas light products, but some of your old lights may still contain excessive levels of lead. Products manufactured outside of the U.S. tend to have higher levels of lead and are often unregulated.
Joseph Laquatra of Cornell University explains, “While some products are starting to have warning labels, there is no coordinated drive to encourage manufacturers to pursue alternatives.” Due to the presence of these toxic materials, when these strands of lights are tossed into a landfill, they can contaminate the soil and water. Therefore, you should never throw holiday lights in the garbage.
You should take care when gathering your old Christmas lights for recycling. In addition to keeping toxic materials out of the landfill, there are also components of these lights that are best recycled into new products. Repurposing lights year-round ensures they get put to better use.
Christmas lights can contain copper, glass, plastic, and polyvinyl chloride (PVC). These are able to be extracted and recycled into new products. In fact, recyclers in China are able to chop up and process old Christmas lights into products such as slipper soles and other plastic products.
Recycling light strands is the best way to dispose of them, but one thing you should not do is toss old strands of lights into your residential curbside recycling bin. Because residential haulers are not able to separate strands of lights effectively from other recyclables, they will probably just end up in a landfill instead of being processed for recycling.
Here are some good alternatives to tossing old Christmas lights out with your trash or into your curbside recycling bin.
Some recycling centers will accept Christmas lights at the end of the holiday season. These facilities may offer a special recycling program to collect various holiday decorating items, including Christmas trees, ornaments, lights, and packaging material. Christmas light recycling is important, just be sure not to recycle broken lights.
There are several organizations that offer mail-in recycling of Christmas lights and other electronics. To participate, you simply box up your old lights and ship them to a recycling company.
Christmas Light Source uses the proceeds from light recycling to donate books, toys, and educational items to Toys for Tots. Holiday LEDS accepts old lights in exchange for a coupon for a discount on new energy-efficient LED lights. Capitol Asset Recycling is another organization to consider.
Home improvement and hardware stores such as The Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Ace Hardware often accept old Christmas lights. They collect them and send them to a recycling facility, along with other roofing and construction materials.
You may be eligible for a coupon with a discount on new lights purchase. Call your local store before driving there to find out if they are running any light collection programs.
Many municipalities operate household hazardous waste facilities for residents to dispose of toxic or hazardous materials. Check with your city resources to find out if the facility near you accepts old Christmas lights.
If your light strands are in working order, donate them. A local Goodwill store will accept strands of working lights. Some schools and senior centers also accept lights to decorate for the holiday season.
You don’t have to recycle your Christmas lights to keep them out of the landfill. You may be able to reuse them instead.
On older strands of lights, if one bulb burned out, the whole string would go dark. Newer lights don’t have this problem. They are manufactured to keep burning even if one or more bulbs burns out.
If you have several strings of lights with single burned-out bulbs, use the good bulbs to replace the ones them. You will end up with strands that are good as new and only a single strand that needs to be discarded.
If you are replacing your old Christmas lights with newer, energy-efficient LED lights, you don’t have to toss all your old strands. Instead, you can use them for other applications.
Strands of lights are lovely in your landscaping and yard year-round and can be strung along fences, patio awnings, and kids’ playhouse. College students love strands of light to make their dorm rooms feel cozy, and white lights are a staple of outdoor wedding décor and other special events.
Any time you need to discard some of your old incandescent light strands, consider replacing them with a set of LED lights. While LED lights cost more upfront, they pay for themselves over the life of the strand with savings in energy costs.
Christmas lights account for about 6% of the country’s total energy consumption in the month of December. Energy-efficient LED lights can reduce that significantly. The U.S. Department of Energy reports that LED bulbs use up to 75% less energy and can last up to 25 times as long. Not only does this reduce energy use, it also means that fewer strands are thrown out each year.
LED lights come in many colors, shapes, and sizes, and are often sold as programmable sets, letting you set your lights to a timer or pattern of display. They also burn much cooler than traditional Christmas lights, making them a safer choice for use on real Christmas trees by preventing tree fires. They can even run on car batteries, which saves you money on a home energy bill. In terms of efficiency, durability, and design, LED lights are a better choice than incandescent bulbs for any application.
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