Celebrate a ‘Green’ Christmas Waste not, want not!

 

 

While Christmas is a magical, wonderful time of year, it’s also commonly criticized as the most wasteful season. Throughout the Christmas season everyone buys more, eats more and throws more away.

 

Here are a few ways you can cut down on your holiday consumption to help lighten the environmental load on our planet.

• Shorten your Christmas list. Rather than buying a gift for casual friends and neighbors, host a party. Be the person who brings everyone together and you’ll be at the top of everyone’s list.

 

• If you don’t want to throw a get-together, make donations to environmental charities in your friends’ names or ‘buy’ them an acre of rainforest. The money you spend goes towards the protection and maintenance of ecologically significant areas.
• Showing your holiday spirit with pretty packages and decorations is a popular tradition. Be a trendsetter and focus your decorations on reducing and reusing. Give reusable bags or wrap a gift in another gift like a t-shirt or scarf. Put fewer decorations up and choose ones that are reusable and don’t require power. Live decorations like evergreen boughs and holly are also great because they add scent to your holiday décor and can be composted after the holidays.
• You can also create less waste by making things yourself and reusing your holiday trimmings. Make your own wrapping paper and cards and make sure to unwrap your gifts carefully so you can reuse the paper. An even better way to save is to avoid wrapping gifts in paper at all.

By simply reducing what you use over the holidays, even a little bit, you can lessen the waste that is left over from Christmas and help make our world a cleaner, healthier place to live.