Artist Michael Neff started a new Christmas tradition in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. For the past two years, a few weeks after Christmas, he suspends dozens of unadorned and discarded Christmas trees under the Brooklyn-Queens-Expressway (BQE). “I wanted to give the trees another opportunity, and perhaps encourage people to think about our consumption around Christmas,” he wrote. The area is fenced off from the public but the adjacent Metropolitan Avenue gets a lot of foot traffic.
On the West Coast, residents of Riverside County, CA are encouraged to recycle their trees not for the sake of art but for fish. The California Department of Fish and Game submerges trees 10 to 15 feet in Lakes Elsinore, Gregory, Hemet and Perris (using concrete blocks to anchor them), to provide hiding places for small fish populations at risk from larger predatory fish.