ECONOTES : A Christmas Gift for Recyclers

Christmas may be over for most people, but not for the city of Los Angeles’ Bureau of Sanitation. It has issued a last call for Christmas trees and will even pick them up.

Any resident served by the city’s automated trash collection who still has a tree moldering in the back yard can leave it at curbside on the regular trash collection day, and it will be picked up and sent to the compost heap.

This mop-up operation, which ends Friday, is the final phase of the city’s expanding Christmas tree recycling program, now in its fifth year. Last week’s drop-off program netted more than 12,000 trees at eight locations citywide.

Residents who took their trees to the drop-off sites were rewarded with discount theater tickets to the IMAX film “Tropical Rain Forest” at the California Museum of Science and Industry. They also received a coupon for a free bag of compost from Kellogg Fertilizer Supply Co., redeemable immediately at 25 nurseries throughout the city.

This week’s curbside pickup is being added for the first time, in hopes of getting the last holdouts. Rather than fading away, the recycled evergreens, which have a slightly high acid content, will become fertilizer for next spring’s azaleas and camellias.