COVINGTON, Ky. — As Northern Kentuckians bask in the unusually warm February weather, they can fondly remember back to when they plucked their half-burnt out light strands from their 2022 holiday decorations and cheerily chucked them into one of the region's recycling locations.
Throughout Northern Kentucky, residents hauled their festive, yet faulty filaments to the recycling heap, which resulted in the recycling of roughly 3,500 pounds of lights — around the size of a full-grown male giraffe.
In Covington alone, the city's Solid Waste & Recycling Division, along with Keep Covington Beautiful and Cohen Recycling, 507 pounds of lights were collected from the four different drop-off sites.
Eight locations throughout Kenton County as a whole saw 1,819 pounds collected. In Campbell County, 760 pounds were dropped off at six different locations. Boone County ditched 414 pounds of non-working lights at three different locations.
According to a press release from the city of Covington, the copper wiring and contacts from any recycled lights were stripped at Cohen Recycling for reuse.
Sheila Fields, Covington's Solid Waste & Recycling manager, said the program saved landfill space, kept metals out of the earth and earned local governments participating in the recycling efforts a nominal fee, though how much that fee came to was not released.
“We were glad to see the expansion of the holiday light recycling initiative across Northern Kentucky this past year as more and more partners and local governments decided to take part,” Fields said in a press release. “But there is a lot of room to grow with those numbers. We want to make it easier for people to recycle materials that aren’t accepted in curbside programs but really need to be kept out of the environment.”
Another recycling effort by Covington to gather holiday trees at the end of the season resulted in 657 discarded, natural trees being ground into mulch.
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