Deck the Halls with Sustainability
The holiday season (November through January) brings three joyous months filled with overflowing delicious dinners and traditions, reminiscing with family and friends, gift exchanges, and looking forward to what the new year will bring. However, due to marketing, deals, overproduction, and overconsumption, the holidays have become the most wasteful time of the year. In adopting the following eco-friendly tips, we can still make this a season of giving, reflecting, and celebrating with our loved ones and the environment in mind.
Thanksgiving
Food Waste
With Thanksgiving being a food-centered holiday, it’s no surprise that heaps of food waste come from a family-filled affair of shared memories, grateful reflections, and an enticing, belly-filling meal. With 5.6 billion pounds of turkey being raised annually, 200 million pounds are thrown out after Thanksgiving. Along with the turkey, much of Thanksgiving’s food waste ends up in landfills. Food waste in landfills experiences a drastically slow, putrefying breakdown due to the lack of oxygen from food and non-food waste piled on each other. This process causes the production of the odorless, colorless gas called methane. While lighter than air and found naturally in volcanoes, permafrost, and wetlands, methane has become a major catalyst in global warming due to its heat retention properties. Methane is a more potent, radioactive greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, currently being rapidly produced by burning fossil fuels, livestock farming, and the unnatural breakdown of food waste in our landfills, especially after Thanksgiving.
Alternatives
Composting
Source: Reader’s Digest
Shop from your refrigerator first and make a list to reduce any excessive grocery purchases for the exact amount of food your family needs
Compost any food scraps that can be used to nourish your backyard or garden
Plan a “leftover” night to eat or reinvent your leftovers into more exciting meals to consume
Freeze any leftovers to enjoy at a later time or refresh around Christmas
Donate any uneaten, unopened, or non-perishable items to your local charity, shelters, and anyone you see in need
Black Friday & Cyber Monday Shopping
The looming holidays after Thanksgiving spark the desire to capture the greatest deals to share with one's loved ones and self that are usually hard to obtain throughout most of the year. The solution: Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This tradition replenishes our energy and excitement to head out the door or to the internet after we’ve filled our bellies with extra rounds of Thanksgiving dinner and dessert. But even the greatest of deals comes with a hefty price. One 2019 study found that 80% of all Black Friday items sold (along with the plastic wrapping) end up in landfill shortly after due to their low quality, and short life. Such an explosion of mass production, natural resource depletion, consumer-driven pollution, and delivery transportation aids in the emission of unfathomable greenhouse gas emissions. A 2021 report found that transportation alone for Black Friday and Cyber Monday deliveries causes 429,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions (and that’s just in the UK), the equivalent of “435 return flights from London to New York”, with an even higher estimate for the United States.
Alternatives
Second-Hand Shopping
Source: Pinterest
Support your small local stores or second-hand stores such as Outdoor Gear Revival or Planet Xchange - Knoxville, for a “Green Friday” experience
Ditch the plastic bags for reusable totes
Forget the bags, and use those delivery cardboard boxes to collect your in-store purchases
Create DIY gifts to add your special touch to give to your loved ones
Christmas
Consumption
Christmas is a time that some prepare their entire year to celebrate. Whether by collecting gifts, planning the annual lighting decorations, or figuring out whose homes to bring the celebration to, Christmas has become a serious matter for festivities, fun, and fellowship in most households. However, it’s become more of a marketing treasure than anything else, with decorations, deals, and flights advertised as early as October (and sometimes earlier). This spirit of giving and receiving, decorative creativity, and hospitable prowess tend to lead those who participate in a state of excess. Excessive gifts, excessive decorations (that are most times for one-time use), excessive traveling, and excessive food. Ultimately, leading our total consumption and spending for decorations, food, gifts, and travel to add up to 650 kilograms or 1,433 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions...per person.
Alternatives
Consider second-hand decorations from stores like Knoxville’s KARM Stores Christmas
Opt for natural decorations like pinecone centerpieces, wreaths from leftover yard clippings, and dried fruit window hangings
If travel is necessary, opt for a family train ride that’ll be sure to create fond memories on your way to your destination
Swap out material gifts for experiences i.e. a spa day, a movie night membership, a cooking class, a painting class, a language learning subscription, etc.
Wrapping Paper
The barrier that encases your holiday surprise holds much more than that new flatscreen TV or tennis bracelet. With 40% of all global industrial logging reserved for creating paper, half of that is dedicated to wrapping paper. One single kilogram of wrapping paper creates seven pounds of carbon dioxide. While most paper can be recycled, due to the additional plastics, glitter, shine additives, colors, and more, wrapping paper isn’t one of them. Wrapping paper is heavily discarded after its one-time use, creating four million tons of waste from wrapping paper out of the five million tons of total waste produced from the Christmas holiday.
Alternatives
Teach yourself the Japanese art of Furoshiki Wrapping (cloth wrapping)
Get creative with recycled paper that you can decorate yourself or leave blank for a sleek look
Repurpose those gift bags you have lying around
New Year
Confetti
What seems so tiny can make such an impact we never saw coming. This tiny burst of fun released on New Year’s Day, birthdays, gender reveal parties, and more are traditionally made of plastics such as polyvinyl chloride (PVC). Due to its size, confetti is deemed non-recyclable, and such plastic doesn’t break down for 1,000 years (if it even does). This leaves a prolonged time for this material to become harmful to the soil and animals when ingested, and ultimately hard to remove from the environment. Three thousand to 100,000 pounds of confetti can be dropped on New Year’s Eve in New York City alone.
Alternatives
Dried Flower Petals
Source: Dried Flower Craft
Dried leaves and flower petals
Hole punch leftover fruit peels
“Winter” inspired herb mix with thyme, rosehip, sage, chamomile, and winterberries
Bird seeds
Balloons
New Year’s Eve traditions have resulted in 25,000 to almost 130,000 balloons being released annually on this single night of celebration. While we’d love to think that balloons will be soaring the skies, never to be seen again, they eventually come back down, settling into areas not meant for them. An estimated 31,000 balloons have been found to end up on US beaches each year, with sailmen and families finding them in the sea where they threaten wildlife who accidentally ingest them, become entangled in them, are injured by them, and more. So why aren’t balloons banned completely? They’re often marketed as “biodegradable”, leaving consumers to believe they'll eventually decompose into the environment or sky. But in reality, balloons don’t break down completely due to the additives needed to make the “natural” latex into a balloon, regardless of the environment it lands in (compost, freshwater, and marine).
Alternatives
Reusable Paper Lanterns
Source: Pinterest
Reusable paper balloons
Paper lanterns (not sky/fire lanterns)
Banners
Bubbles
Being sustainable this holiday season and each year forward, not only helps us to keep the environment in mind, but it can also create a greater sense of gratitude, joy, and optimism that the Earth can be proud of.
Happy Holidays from Keep Knoxville Beautiful!