As Medfield residents clean up those last remnants of the holidays, the Mass. Department of Environmental Protection and Medfield Department of Public Works want to remind folks to dispose of and recycle Christmas trees properly.

The Department of Public Works asks that Christmas trees be brought to the transfer station so they can properly dispose of them.

"We take [the trees] at the transfer station, [residents] have to bring them to us," said Kenneth Feeney, Superintendent of Medfield Public Works. "We do recycle them. We chip them up and put them into the compost and reuse them so there's a little bit of recycling going on there." 

Trees can also be picked up by local boy scouts, according to Feeney, and brought to the transfer station for a small fee.

"I think the charge is $10," Feeney said of residents having town boy scouts pick their Christmas trees up for disposal. 

The DPW reminds residents to make sure all ornaments, tinsel and tree bags are removed before leaving trees out for pick up or bringing them down to the transfer station. 

Why worry about disposal and recycling in the first place? The MassDEP says that each year Mass. residents buy one million cut Christmas trees. Their website states that, "simply throwing them away would not only be a waste of reusable resources, but a disposal problem. If all the cut trees sold in Massachusetts this holiday season were packed tightly together on their sides, they could...create a pile that would rise ten stories and span a football field from one goal post to the other."

According to the MassDEP website over 200 towns and cities in the state have recycling programs for leftover Christmas trees to help alleviate the disposal problem.