You’ve hopefully already made a plan to recycle your Christmas tree. Now you can do the same for old and broken Christmas lights.
The Houston Zoo is accepting old and broken Christmas lights to recycle them and keep them out of local landfills.
The zoo has a collection bin for lights at its main entrance through Sunday.
“Before you pack away your holiday decorations, give your old or broken string lights a new purpose and recycle them at the zoo,” according to a post on the zoo’s Facebook page. “Now through Jan. 4, 2026, simply drop them off at the zoo’s main entrance and take an easy step toward protecting wildlife.”
Since the project began seven years ago, the zoo has recycled 38,274 pounds of holiday lights which they calculate weighs almost as much as all the zoo’s female Asian elephants combined.
“Recycling helps keep unwanted items out of landfills. The fewer landfills we need for human waste, the more space there is for animals!” according to information from the Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter in sharing the holiday light program.
This donation bin is for lights only and not other decorations, floodlights, cords or light hooks.
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The Houston Zoo also recycles handheld electronic devices all year including cell phones, smart phones, iPods or other MP3 players, iPads or other tablets, WiFi hot spots, handheld gaming devices, GPS, electronic accessories such as chargers, blue tooth headsets, and more.
The collection box for these items is located at the main entrance next to Guest Relations.
Here’s that Facebook post. They’ve been doing this since just before Thanksgiving, at the start of Zoo Lights, so if you’re wondering why you’re just hearing about this now, you’ll be able to plan better for next year. We dropped off some dead lights a few weeks ago, it was easy, they let us pull over to the curb near the entrance and then carry the lights we were dumping off to the bin. Take advantage of this, and of their broader electronics recycling, if you can.
On a side note, when I wrote about Christmas tree recycling earlier, I said that I didn’t have info about San Antonio, which I had had last year. I have it now, so if you’re in San Antonio you know what to do.