Now that December is over, and with it Christmas and New Year’s Eve, we’ll be saying hello to 2025! Unfortunately, however, that does mean we’ll have to say goodbye to 2024…and all those Christmas lights and trees we bought for the holidays. Sorry, Leafy.
Citizens can expect to see a lot of discarded conifers lying on the sidewalks of neighborhoods. Christmas tree collection trucks (yes, those are a thing) will be rolling through the streets of America for the next two weeks or so.
Although, so many discarded trees on the streets could get someone thinking: exactly how many trashed firs will we be seeing on the pavement? In 2023, the Sanitation Department collected an insane 1,000 tons of trees from all the boroughs of New York, and the specific numbers were all listed in the NYC Open Data website.
Starting from the bottom of the list is Staten Island, who had around 72 tons, or 144000 pounds, worth of discarded trees collected. Number four is the Bronx, who produced a good 106 tons, and then Brooklyn, who had a decent 246 tons of thrown-out evergreens.
The two top contenders are Queens and Manhattan, who had 306 tons, and, get this, a whopping 340 tons of collected trees, respectively.
If we get more specific, however, the numbers change a little. We’ll see that Staten Island is actually ahead if we look at the average pounds of tree trash per home, with 0.78 per house. Manhattan comes in second with their 0.73 pounds per home, Queens with 0.67, and Brooklyn fourth with 0.44 per home. Finally, the Bronx comes in last, with only 0.38 pounds of tree per home.