As the holidays approach us, it's hard not to catch a bit of the contagious holiday magic that's in the air. The time for giving, getting together with family, and eating a lot of food are typical for most, and many don't realize what a negative impact this time of the year can have on our planet. Between all of the carbon emmissions from excessive traveling, the abundance of wrapping paper, discarded decorations and waste getting thrown into the trash and ultimately winding up in landfills or the oceans, I mean, it doesn't sound too magical anymore, does it? Let's try to find some ways to enjoy the holidays but be environmentally conscious and thoughtful to our mother earth at this time of the year too. What follows in this blog is a ton of awesome environmentally friendly lifestyle tips for the holidays, and most of these tips can be utilized year round!
Get natural candles this year when trying to create a festive, scented environment in your home or when purchasing hanukkah candles. Paraffin wax comes from petroleum and releases the equivalent of diesel exhaust when burned (and carcinogens into the environment!). Opt for natural beeswax or soy candles instead, which burn cleaner and longer.
Real Christmas Trees are actually better for the environment than reusable plastic ones, which are made with harmful PVC and ultimately gets discarded. The "greenest" tree is a natural tree that can be replanted or reused afterwards. Real christmas trees provide environmental benefits as they grow, especially if organic and can be recycled afterwards. I'm not a fan myself of so many trees getting chopped down so if you can get a live replantable tree, that's definitely the most eco-friendly option!
Try making an upcycled menorah this year for hanukkah!
Purchase greeting cards from recycled or tree-free materials (they should be labeled) or make your own from craft materials you already have! Just a 1 percent reduction of the 2 billion cards from regular paper sent per year in America could save 15,000 trees!
Use LED holiday lights to save money and energy, and for a much longer lifespan.
When it comes to decorating for such a festive time of year, consider ways to produce less waste. I've seen tons of decorations at Goodwill all year round, that will save you money, reduce waste on packaging, and can then be donated again when you're finished. Other thrift stores, and often times garage sales will have many to choose from as well. You can donate brand new decorations to a thrift store if you don't plan on storing them or using them again. ⅔ of households buy brand new decorations every year and spend over 7.5 billion dollars, and most of these wind up in the trash. Try using eco-friendly decorations like live seasonal plants (like poinsettia and holly) that can be replanted or kept all year round, and pinecones which are natural, wintery and festive, and can simply be placed back outside once the holidays are over. If you want some unique ornaments, try making your own with recycled and household items.
When wrapping gifts try using reusable and recycled materials. Between Thanksgiving and New Year's, Americans produce an extra 2 billion pounds of garbage each week, mostly of which is gift packaging. Try to use reusable gift bags or baskets when possible. There are gift bags that have been in our family for so many years.. some even since I was a kid because we literally use them over and over again and just pass them back and forth. If you prefer wrapping paper, use a brand that is made from recycled paper and try to reuse if possible. Avoid metallics, these cannot be recycled. Other ideas include using newspaper, brown paper bags, old maps, old calendars, pages of vintage books, pages from old magazines (I love using pictures that have something to do with the person I'm gifting), or even old mylar balloons cut up (my mom used to do this.. great way to repurpose balloons which are harmful to the environment and also are not recyclable). To top your presents, use recyclable paper bows, flowers or bows made out of newspaper, an old scarf, ribbon or string reused from past gifts or packages, reusable fabric, or dried flowers. Save odds and ends throughout the year that would be good decorative additions to wrapped presents. When shipping a gift off via mail, use brown paper bags to wrap it, or reuse old boxes or packages. I used to work at Petsmart and whenever we had a fish order come in, I would save all of the insulation material packed with the tropical fish bags to use as extra padding and cover for shipping packages. You can beautify with recycled materials just like a wrapped gift.
Take a look at the BIG picture when it comes to shopping. The US is the top consumer nation in the world. Americans shop for an average of 24 minutes per day and spending a total of 4 trillion dollars a year... on STUFF. 2.3 million shoes are purchased every DAY, 2.6 billion toys bought every YEAR, and a new car made about every second. These things don't last forever, and people certainly don't keep them forever, so imagine that soon enough those millions and billions of items will be discarded somewhere. Ever wonder what happens to unsold cars? Maybe that article is exaggerated but it's a bit mind-blowing....
Did you know that if you look at North America from space, the highest point on the eastern seaboard is a landfill? Every month, 100,000 CD's get thrown away and every year 50,000,000 toothbrushes decorate landfills all over the country. Look around you at all of the items that get discarded and try to wrap your mind around what those discarded items do to our earth. Our society is disposable, and we constantly buy more to get rid of the old, and most of these items wind up in the trash. The average amount of "objects" in a family home in the US averages around 10,000 items. All of these manufactured items uses ⅓ the energy and 13 percent of the water supply in the US to be created, in addition to over 7.6 billion tons of waste that's produced BEFORE Americans even get to purchase the products made from the manufacturing plant that creates so much waste. The US has SO much garbage that we actually send some of it over to other countries to dispose of.
So when you think about it, do you really need to buy half those items in your cart? Can some of the items in your garbage can be recycled or repurposed? What kinds of recyclables can actually be reused or remade into holidays gifts this year? What kinds of materials could actually be used to wrap your holiday gifts this year for a unique and fun present? Think outside the box a bit, to be create while helping to save our planet.
How to have LESS of an impact when shopping:
1. Buy products with minimal or no packaging. Almost ten percent of the money you pay for purchases is the cost of packaging. If every household minimized how many packaged products they buy, we could save 5.5 billion pounds from entering landfills.
2. Choose PAPER over plastic. Better yet- use a reusable tote! I always keep a stash of tote bags in my car and bring them all (stuff a bunch of them into one tote to carry) in with me when I shop so I can use them instead of plastic bags to carry out my purchases. Totes are also more reliable than both plastic AND paper, as the handles won't rip or break on you and the bag is thicker and sturdier (and much more fashionable!). If you forget yours, choose paper, which is more likely to be recycled and can also be reused to wrap presents, textbooks or packages that you plan to mail (I do it all the time!). Plus have you checked out how cool Trader Joe's bags are? They totally give you some recycling ideas right on the bag. Keep in mind too that millions of plastic bags litter the environment and harm endangered (and non-endangered) marine animals every year. Don't even get me started on how many sea turtles mistake plastic bags for jelly fish (their favorite meal) and choke to death from eating them.
3. Get the recycled toilet paper. I guess some people have preferences for extra soft, extra absorbent, extra thick... but if everyone replaced just ONE of their 12 packs of bathroom tissue with a recycled variety, we could save almost 5 million trees and 17,000 garbage trucks worth of paper waste!
4. Shop (and donate to) thrift stores! Getting reused items (that you can totally just disinfect and clean up) for garage sale prices is a great way to save money and help the environment by creating less waste of buying new items and getting rid of old. Garage sales and craigslist are other great ways to acquire reused items for less money and get rid of things you may have otherwise thrown away while making a little money too.
When buying gifts this year:
1. Be conscious about the clothing you buy.. especially if the gift receiver cares about the environment, they'll be glad you were! Buying clothes with natural colors (to reduce dyes used in the textile industry), organic cotton (eliminates chemicals from the environment being used to grow non-organic cotton), faux fur ALWAYS over real fur (to save money, use LESS fossil fuels, and refuse to support the CRUEL fur industry where many furs actually come from domestic dogs and cats that get SKINNED ALIVE in other countries!- Just google fur farms to change your mind if you're a fur lover..), try getting second hand clothing (plenty is brand new at consignment stores, and you can wash awesome and unique finds from thrift stores), and choose shoes made from recycled materials to literally reduce your carbon "footprint".
2. Be aware when buying toys for the kids this year. Try to get toys made from natural materials over plastic, especially toys that may wind up in children's mouths. Many plastic toys (action figures, dolls, etc.) are made of PVC and contain toxins (known as phthalate) that are harmful to the environment and children's health. Look for toys with minimal or no packaging to reduce waste, and look for toys made of wood which is a renewable resource.
3. Gifts for your pets come in recycled and more eco-friendly options too. Look for pet beds filled with recycled materials, toys made from recycled materials (or make your own dog toys from household items!), and get dog treats that have little or no packaging (or bake your own!)
Be green when getting holiday groceries this year:
1. Get fresh baked bread from a local bakery. This bread should come in a paper (recyclable) wrapper, and saves the energy used on freezing and transporting shelf brands. When you do get sliced packaged bread, try to get the kind that uses less wrappers... such as one wrapper instead of two. The waste generated by the additional wrapper on packaged sliced breads in the US and Canada would weigh around 60,000 pounds.
2. When getting your canned goods for cooking and baking, stock up and get a BIG can instead of a couple small ones. This conserves resources, and if every US household replaced one big can for 2 small ones just once a month, the annual savings in steel could build an Eiffel Tower on each of the 6 other continents.
3. Buy items in bulk. You'll save 50% more money and also reduce the amount of energy and waste on packaging.
4. Get blocks of cheese instead of individually sliced cheese to save plastic. The amount of energy used to make the plastic wrappers for slices of American cheese is over 13.8 million gallons of gasoline- enough for the entire population of Milwaukee to carpool out west to California.
5. When buying ground or whole bean coffee, look for varieties labeled Organic, Fair Trade, Bird Friendly, or Rainforest Alliance certified. These indicate that coffee has come from a coffee farm that practices sustainable agriculture that preserves or restores rainforest ecosystems. If every household switched to this sustainable coffee for a year, we could protect 9,200 square feet of rainforest.
6. Buy local! If there's a local farmer's market, definitely get what you can there support local farmers and businesses, and save energy on transportation costs for all the goods transported to your local supermarket.
7. Here's a quick education on where your fish and seafood come from. Always choose sustainably wild harvested fish over farmed varieties. Farmed fish have higher levels of heavy metals and can be threats to endangered populations of wild fish species. If you're concerned about the well-being and treatment of the fish you're eating, it's best to avoid farming as the fish are raised and housed in horrible conditions, and wild caught at least get to live out their lives naturally being being caught and processed. Fish farms produce a lot of waste (the amount of waste from the average fish farm that enters the tide is equivalent to the raw sewage of 65,000 people being dumped directly into the ocean). If you would like to get more knowledge on the most sustainable varieties of fish to purchase, try using the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood App (download it onto your phone.. it makes it easy to look things up while shopping, I use mine all the time!) It also will let you know which varieties pose a health risk as well. When buying fish, if the label doesn't even tell you where it comes from (or what it is!) then you should pass on that...
Also try to get fresh fish instead of canned when you can. A lot of energy and resources are wasted in the canning process, in addition to double the water and 5% of the edible fish being wasted.
8. When it comes to meat, my least favorite subject, there are ways around the cruelty and environmental impacts if you insist on eating it. Go for local farmed meat, where the animals were raised and treated better, and fed natural diets that will make the meat healthier for you (I've heard it even tastes better). Try to limit your meat intake and only buy what you and your family will actually eat. Over 22 pounds of edible store-bought meat and 12 pounds of edible poultry goes uneaten and is wasted on each meat eating person per year. If you think about all the people on the planet and do the math.. that sure is a lot of edible meat (and dead animals) wasted. Each year, 55,000 gallons of water and 100 pounds of uneaten grain are wasted per person on the earth (including YOU) due to the resources used to raise meat. Just look up factory farming to learn more about why (that kind) of meat should be avoided, for many reasons besides the pollution and harm to the environment. There's a little more behind the reasons of vegetarianism than you may have thought..
9. Buy organic! You can lower your exposure to pesticides and chemicals by 90 percent, and by supporting organic farming methods, we can help improve the environment by using less chemicals. Also, fresh fruits and veggies are better for you and use much less energy to produce and package than canned or frozen ones.
10. Soy is a good alternative to meat and uses much less water to grow. If just 20 percent of households in North America substituted 4 ounces of beef for 4 ounces of soy each week, we could save enough water to provide 10 gallons of drinking water to every person in the world.
11. When getting flowers for the holiday table this year, look for bouquets that have the rainforest alliance certified logo on it, to ensure that the flowers were grown in a sustainable way, or get fresh cut flowers from a local farm if you live in a warmer climate.
12. Buy domestic wines, and organic varieties if you can this holiday season.
I know it's a lot to take in.. but these are just some simple ways to minimize your environmental impact this holiday season. Let's not just think of ourselves this year, but by giving back to our planet for the holidays and by attempting to make some positive changes in this upcoming year. Happy Holidays to all, and hope you'll utilize some of these lifestyle changes!
(Most of these green tips came from the New York Times Bestseller "the green book" by Elizabeth Rogers and Thomas M. Kostigen)
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