Your holiday garbage guide: Which bin, when they’ll pick up

Christmas is not a garbage day in Orange County.

Like most other government workers and many private-sector employees, the county’s waste-hauling crews will not be working on Christmas Day, one of only two holidays the sanitation crews get off. Thanksgiving is the other.

The holiday means no trash, recycling, yard waste or bulk waste collection on Tuesday and all regular collection schedules will be pushed back a day, said Jamie Floer, spokeswoman Orange County Utilities.

If Tuesday is your usual pick-up day, set out your rollcarts, yard waste and large items by 6 a.m. Wednesday.

Christmas Eve regular pickup day.

The same goes for residents in Lake County, where all collection days for the rest of the week will be pushed back one day. In Seminole, the next scheduled garbage collection will be the Friday after Christmas, followed by recycling on Saturday.

The notice about the collection schedule was accompanied by the solid-waste division’s annual appeal for customers to properly recycle holiday items — keeping holiday wrap and plastic bags out of blue-lid recycling bins. Most wrapping papers, along with ribbons, bows and stringy light sets, belong in the green-lid carts.

Those things contaminate recycling loads and should be sent to the landfill. is a

When in doubt, out, Floer said.

To understand why tons of recyclable aluminum cans, cardboard boxes and newspapers end up buried in the dump every week, Orange County solid waste employees peeked into every recycling cart in one neighborhood for two months.

During the study, the biggest problem was plastic bags.

Keep them out because they jam up the machinery, said David Gregory, Orange County’s solidwaste manager.

“It’s a common mistake,” Gregory said. “It’s not that used plastic bags can’t be recycled into new materials, they just require a different collection system and different processing equipment than the county’s curbside program uses.”

The county’s recycling rules are outlined in depth at www.ocfl.net/recycles.

Real Christmas trees can be set out at the curb on yard waste collection day for recycling. Trees over six feet should be cut in half. Remember to remove all ornaments, decorations and stands before placing the tree at the curb.

Artificial trees are not collected with yard waste. They go in the garbage. The Orange County Utilities Solid Waste Hotline at 407-836-6601 will be closed on Christmas Eve and Christmas.

Customers can visit online at www.ocfl.net/ GreenClean for more information. leave it