In 2024, New York turned 250 Christmas trees into breakwaters to restore salt marsh

What looked like holiday waste ended up helping rebuild a fragile salt marsh at Jamaica Bay, where the trees were turned into nearly 600 feet of natural breakwaters. In 2024, 250 discarded Christmas trees were repurposed into nearly 600 linear feet of natural breakwaters at New York’s Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, helping protect newly planted salt-marsh vegetation from waves and erosion, according to the Jamaica Bay-Rockaway Parks Conservancy (JBRPC) and its 2024 Wetlands Fellowship report. By autumn, the organisation said the barriers had begun trapping enough sediment to become partially buried in the growing marsh. It was an unusual afterlife for trees that, just weeks earlier, had stood decorated in New York homes.From Christmas trees to coastal protectionThe trees were used at the West Pond Living Shoreline, an ecological restoration project at the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. The shoreline had been badly damaged when Superstorm Sandy breached the freshwater pond in 2012, allowing saltwater to enter an ecosystem that had previously supported freshwater habitat.The restoration project, completed in 2021, rebuilt about 2,400 feet of shoreline, created more than nine acres of new...