With the holiday season over and the decorations coming down, are you thinking about tossing your old lights? Instead of sending them to the landfill, recycle them! I have seen at least two recycling programs, both offering incentives and a way to replace your old incandescent lights with energy-efficient LED lights.

HolidayLEDs.com is one website offering to recycle your lights. Send them in and in return you will receive a 15% off coupon towards a purchase from their website. Their website sells a wide variety of LED lights. Not only do they carry Christmas tree lights and icicle lights, but they also sell orange lights for Halloween, green lights for St. Patrick’s Day, and various other colors, shapes and types of lights. If you weren’t planning to replace your lights, their selection alone might convince you to do so!

Christmas Light Source is another website that offers to recycle your lights. All proceeds from their recycling program will be used to purchase Usborne books that will be donated to the Marine Toys for Tots Foundation. In return for sending your lights you receive a 10% off coupon to use towards a purchase from their website. They sell a variety of lights, not all LED, so be sure to double-check when you are making a purchase. Check out their website for more details.

All of which begs the question, how can incandescent strings of Christmas lights be recycled? Here's how HolidayLEDs describes the recycling process:

When we receive your lights for recycling we will remove them from the package and recycle the box. The lights will be processed and any material that cannot be recycled (i.e. loose bulbs)is discarded. Once we have collected a substantial number of sets we take them to a 3rd party recycling facility located in Jackson, MI. The recycling company puts the lights through a commercial shredder, which chops the lights up into little pieces. The pieces are then further processed and sorted into the various components that make up the lights (pvc, glass, copper.) The materials are separated and transported to a region center for further processing. In some cases, the pvc cannot be recycled.

LED lights can be more expensive up front but will save you money in the long run. LED lights use about 10% the amount of energy that traditional incandescent lights use and according to HolidayLEDs.com are rated for 50,000 hours of use or more while standard incandescent lights typically last for only 2,000 hours.