Have Yourself a Very Little Christmas
Christmas is a wonderful time of the year for many, but it is also the most wasteful time of the year with an increase of over one third of waste leaving our homes. Our annual carbon footprint increases by about 5% during the festive season. So, how can we, as individuals, make a difference?
Fight food waste
According to lovefoodhatewaste.com, throwing away just one Christmas dinner has the equivalent amount of carbon emissions as having a set of 500 fairy lights on all year round! Panic buying, shopping when hungry, and poor meal planning are the main reasons we waste food. Use this handy portion calculator when working out how many spuds and sprouts to cook for the family on Christmas day. These perfectly planned three course Christmas menus (with vegetarian options) for two to six diners are designed to create the minimum amount of waste possible. Check out our blog on food waste here.
Purchase less packaging
Very few online companies offer zero-carbon delivery options, so we should choose who we buy from carefully. If you can, choose to combine multiple purchases into single deliveries to reduce the amount of packaging and road miles needed to get your shopping delivered. Amazon must have the worst credentials and highest carbon footprint out of all the online retailers, since they famously destroy new, boxed, and sealed products if they don’t sell fast enough and dump them in landfill. The alternative would be to support our communities and buy gifts locally, using reusable shopping bags.
Fix those fairy lights
Every year nearly 500 tonnes of fairy lights are thrown away. Fairy lights are notorious for having a short shelf life since the bulbs are usually strung in a series rather than in parallel, so if one bulb goes, they all go. It is worth spending more on good quality fairy lights that are wired up in parallel. If, and when, they do break, try to fix them, take them to a repair café, or recycle at a suitable place that accepts electrical goods.
Say goodbye to glitter
Anything glittery cannot be recycled, since it is made from tiny pieces of aluminium and plastic, and inevitably ends up in landfill. It is then washed away by rain, makes its way into the ocean and, you guessed it, the food chain. However, supermarkets are now producing less glittery products and offering recyclable alternatives. Thankfully, biodegradable glitter is now on the market, so keep an eye out when buying glittery Christmas cards etc. You can find out more about water pollution in our last blog.
And finally, a lighthearted look at some Christmas preparations going on in the green-minded home:
From all of us at GreenFriends UK, we wish you a Very Little Christmas and a Nearly New Year (groan).
