Cleaning up your yard is a great way to improve the look of your home's exterior. Piles of junk and unused or rarely-used items can accumulate around your yard and make things look unkempt. Hauling away your junk with a rented trash bin is a great idea, but first look to see what items you can recycle and even earn some money from. Here are three types of yard clutter you can sell, recycle, or reuse before you dump it.

Wood and Lumber Scraps

You may have a variety of different wood scraps in your yard that you want to get rid of. Wooden pallets are an item that have become popular for crafting, so if you can find a local community yard posting page, post them for sale to make a few dollars. 

You can also contact local manufacturing companies who are always buying pallets in good condition to use for their production. Contact several local manufacturing companies to see if they can buy them from you, and you can get from $2.50 to $3.50 each, depending on their condition. Or, you can also sell your pallets directly to a pallet recycling company for a little less money.

Any chemically treated lumber or other woods must be dumped in the dumpster. Wood that has been painted can be stripped and recycled with a wood recycling company or sold and reused by someone in your community. Post a sale ad in a local community online yard sale page to find a buyer for your recycled wood. 

If you have molding, flooring, or lumber that is still in good condition, collect it and you can sell or donate it to a wood recycling company or wood reuse company. Eco-friendly contractors like to reuse these types of wood products that are still in good condition instead of buying new materials. Smaller scraps of wood can be recycled into animal bedding and litter, wood composite materials, paper pulp, and briquettes or wood stove pellets.

Old Tires

Old tires in your yard can make your yard look cluttered and collect rainwater, which becomes a breeding ground for mosquitoes, so you should get them out of your yard. But, before you dump them in the dumpster, find out how you can sell them to a tire recycling company. Contact several local retreading companies to find out what types of tires they will buy from you. Tire retreading companies will take old and used tires and retread the casings. Other tire recycling companies will shred the rubber from the tires and use it in asphalt production, racetracks, and rubber mulch in playgrounds.

Many types of tires have steel woven into the tire, making up approximately 15 percent of the tire, and can be recycled into other steel products. Tires can also be chipped and burned as fuel for power plants and cement kilns instead of burning coal. Tires are an energy efficient fuel because they have a high BTU (British thermal unit) rating so they burn hotter than other materials.

Yard Refuse

If your yard has become overgrown with grass, vegetation, and cluttered with dead tree branches and bagged leaves, you can compost these versus filling the landfill with them. Using a shovel or a rototiller, mix grass clippings, vegetation trimmings, and leaves directly into your flower beds and garden to add organic nutrients back into the soil. Or you can spread it over the top of your soil as a mulch to keep weeds down and help your soil keep its moisture during the summer heat. 

You can also rent or borrow a wood chipper and chip any dead tree branches lying around your yard to make a free mulch for your flower beds and garden. 

Use these three tips to benefit from some of the clutter and junk lying around your yard instead of throwing it in a dumpster. If you own a business, you can also cut down on some commercial trash removal by recycling or selling whatever you can.