Ease up on the lights. We all remember the days when our neighbors Biff and Madge used to cover their house in 2000 strings of lights and 15 bobbing plastic reindeers, but those days are over. Now if you must have lights, consider a modest string or two of LED lights left on for short durations, say 10-15 minutes per day.
Buy a living tree. Don’t cut down a live tree for the Christmas holidays as trees take in carbon dioxide (a principal greenhouse gas) and emit oxygen, purchase a living tree instead. After the holidays are finished you can plant the tree in your yard or consider donating the tree to your municipality or a neighborhood school.
No Christmas cards. I know they make us feel loved, but paper is a rapidly dwindling resource. So this season, instead of sending paper cards opt to send e-cards offered for free by many of the major online card companies. E-cards might not make us feel so good, but with all this waste maybe we don’t deserve to feel so great about ourselves.
Don’t buy gifts. Think of how carbon neutral that would be. No greenhouse gas emissions created from driving to the stores and malls, nor created in the manufacture and shipping of the products from developing nations to a mall near you. If that seems a bit extreme for some, consider the next point.
Buy local. If you have to buy anything, consider buying locally produced gifts. This applies to both gifts and food. Every item has a carbon footprint, but as you can imagine, a gift shipped from China is going to have a larger footprint than one made locally. Ditto for food, importing exotic food products for Christmas will result in a much larger carbon footprint than purchasing products grown locally.
Don’t buy plastic. Yup, you heard us. Eliminate all plastics from the holiday season, no plastic bags, no plastic toys and no plastic packaging. Plastic is made from petroleum, a non-renewable resource.
A vegetarian Christmas. Okay that might be a bit weird for some of you as many people consider a turkey the center piece of Christmas. However, if you consider the impact of factory-farmed meat and poultry on the environment compared to a vegetarian meal, it would be a significant contribution if every Christmas-celebrating person on the planet had at least one meat-free meal this holiday season. It would also alleviate a lot of animal suffering as well.
Stay at home. I know, I know. Who can stay at home when your family lives in Hawaii or England? Or maybe you are leaving your family at home and escaping to Hawaii for the holiday season? Either way, airline travel has the worst impact on the environment out of all the forms of travel. If you have to go somewhere, try not to fly.
Recycle. OK, Christmas is now over and you and your family have produced your own personal landfill. What can a good consumer do? Recycle. Although recycling isn’t justification for rampant consumption, try to find a way to recycle all aspects of holiday excess from the bottles to the cards to the styrofoam packaging. Chucking everything in the landfill is not very kind to Mamma Earth.
Carbon offset. After all is said and done, maybe you now realize that every single aspect of your holiday season has a carbon footprint. Take a moment to calculate your gross holiday consumption and purchase offsets for your family’s holiday season. Nothing says I care about the environment more than a carbon neutral Christmas. That’s a gift your kids will appreciate for the rest of their lives.
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