How should broken holiday lights be recycled?

Date: 11/6/2019

Dear Elizabeth, How can I recycle my Christmas lights?

Dear Reader, Christmas lights seem to break every year, and those broken strands keep piling up. But there is a way to recycle them and get them out of your decoration box.  According to the Christmas- Light-Source’s  Holiday Lighting Energy Calculator, lighting your tree for eight hours a day with two, 100-Bulb strings of LED lights will only cost 27 cents for one month.

While the savings seems small, consider this: If every American switched to Energy Star LEDs, we’d save 700 million kWh of electricity each year, achieving a greenhouse gas emission reduction equivalent to taking 100,000 cars off the road.

LEDs are also more durable. These holiday lights can last up to 10 times as long as incandescents, and because they’re not made of filaments and glass, they won’t burn out or shatter. LED technology also makes neat effects possible, like dimming and color shifting.

There are two companies that you can ship them to. The LED Warehouse takes broken strands and even will send you a 10 percent coupon to buy LED strands, which will last longer too. Include your name and address, and ship in a box without packing to The LED Warehouse, Att: Christmas Light Recycling, 109 E. Prairie St, Vicksburg, MI 49097.

The other mail in company is called HolidayLEDs. You can ship them in a box without packing as well. They offer a 15 percent coupon for new LED lights. You can ship your old lights to the Holiday LEDs Recycling at 2300 S. 170th St.,  New Berlin, WI 5315.

You can also combine your broken lights with friends, neighbors, or groups. The more the merrier!

Dear Elizabeth, Can bottle tops be recycled?

Dear Reader, Bottle tops in our area can be recycled. The best way to recycle them is to leave them on the bottle. Bottle caps pose a hazard to wild life and have become a big littering issue.

For example, a 2016 debris removal effort of Midway Atoll, an island with a population of less than 60 in the middle of the Pacific Ocean (1,300 miles from Honolulu, the closest city), found almost 5,000 bottle caps; if not recycled, these caps travel a large distance and pose a danger to marine life because of their small size.

Also plastic caps don’t biodegrade, meaning it will take hundreds of years for them to decompose in a landfill.

Elizabeth Bone is the Recycling Coordinator for the Town of East Longmeadow. To ask your recycling questions, send her an email at elizabeth.bone@eastlongmeadowma.gov.