Plan Ahead to Lessen Your Impact this Holiday Season

Here it comes—the hustle bustle of the holidays—when fun heartfelt times with family and friends is accompanied by unsustainable consumption and waste. Green up your holidays this year. We have browsed the web and collected the best info we could find to get you started on planning a low impact holiday season, early.

Quick Tidbits, from www.earth911.com:
• When buying presents, keep an eye out for those with minimal packaging, or items packed in recycled or recyclable materials (e.g. cardboard).
• Don’t throw your wrapping paper in the garbage or fireplace. Reuse or recycle!
• Buy recycled wrapping paper and holiday cards.
• Buy cards made from paper (not plastic) and without lots of added decorations, as these cards cannot be recycled.
• Send an e-card instead!
• If you are buying toys or electrical goods that need batteries, buy rechargeable ones, then add a battery charger to your shopping list. Make sure to recycle those old batteries instead of tossing them. Battery Solutions is a great service for this.
• This year, try to plan your meals and only buy food you need. Alternatively, put a compost bin on your shopping list, significantly reducing the trash going to landfill.
• When buying your food, buy local, organic or fair-trade.
• Buy loose rather than pre-packed vegetables to cut down on packaging.
• Recycle your beverage containers, including bottles from wine and plastic egg nog containers.
• If you receive electric goods this season, don’t throw your old ones away. Recycle or donate them using Earth911’s recycling locator.
• If you decorate with a tree, buy a locally grown Christmas tree and remember to recycle it after the holidays are over.
• Take public transportation to go Christmas shopping. If using the car, try to make only one, big trip, cutting down on gas consumption and time.
• Around 125,000 tons of plastic packaging is thrown away over the holiday season. Take your own reusable shopping bags when you do your shopping.
• Make your own food-based gifts such as homemade chutneys, cakes or chocolate truffles. You could also make your own flavored organic olive oil, adding dried chillies, garlic or herbs.
• If you’re having a party, avoid serving food and drinks on disposable plates and cups. If you don’t have enough reusable plates, have everyone bring their own!
• Take any unwanted gifts to a Goodwill location or list them on sites like eBay or Craigslist. A Goodwill close to you can be found using Earth911’s recycling locator.
• Make your New Year’s resolution to live more sustainably in 2010!


Connect with Nature, from www.eartheasy.com

Christmas is a time for giving, and a time for family. What a great opportunity to start a family tradition of giving back to the earth and instilling the values of sustainable living to your children, friends and community. Start an annual, earth-friendly Christmas family tradition! It will also get you outdoors for a few hours to build an appetite for the big dinner.

Annual Christmas Day Bird Count - take your binoculars, a field guide to local birds, a small pad or journal for each participant and walk a course through your neighborhood, local park or countryside. Try to identify and count every bird you see, and make a note of it in your journal. At the end of the hike, list the species seen and number of birds per species. Compare the results from former years and you'll become experts on your local bird population and migration habits.

Family nature hike - a peaceful walk through nature on Christmas day will be remembered and valued more than the score of the football game.
Nature restoration activity - planting a small tree together symbolizes the value of nature and offsets the 'taking' of the Christmas tree. An hour spent cleaning up or enhancing a natural area also enriches the giver and acknowledges nature as the source of our well-being.


Other Ideas From the Sierra Club:

BUY ENERGY-SAVING "LED" HOLIDAY LIGHTS. Now you can decorate your house with LED lights that use 90 percent less energy than conventional holiday lights, and can save your family up to $50 on your energy bills during the holiday season!

MAKE YOUR OWN WRAPPING PAPER. Most mass-produced wrapping paper you find in stores is not recyclable and ends up in landfills. Instead, here's a great chance to get creative! Wrap presents with old maps, the comics section of a newspaper, or children's artwork. Or use a scarf, attractive dishtowel, bandana, or some other useful cloth item. If every family wrapped just three gifts this way, it would save enough paper to cover 45,000 football fields.

DONATE YOUR TIME OR MONEY TO AN ENVIRONMENTAL GROUP. Get into the holiday spirit by volunteering! There are countless ways to help improve your community—and the planet—from cleaning up a local river to helping inner city kids experience the outdoors for the first time. A donation in honor of a loved one can also be a special holiday gift.


Green Holiday Gift Guides:

http://www.treehugger.com/giftguide/
http://green.yahoo.com/gift-guide-2007
http://www.inhabitat.com/2008greengiftguide/
http://www.lowimpactliving.com/products-providers/products/GREEN-HOLIDAY-GIFTS/763


Green Holiday Travel Ideas, from www.ucsusa.org

Pad your schedule. If possible, start your trip a day earlier and/or return a day later. You’ll not only avoid the stress associated with peak travel times, but reduce emissions as well.

Traveling with family? Make it a road trip. The BTS reports that 91 percent of long-distance holiday travelers go by car. On a 500-mile trip, a family of four traveling in a typical SUV actually produces less carbon per person than flying or taking the train. If you can, though, leave the SUV at home and drive a hybrid or fuel-efficient conventional car instead—in addition to consuming more gas, SUVs emit up to four times more carbon than the most efficient hybrid. If you don’t own a hybrid, consider renting one.

Fly the eco-friendly skies. First-class seating requires twice the space of coach and therefore produces twice the amount of carbon emissions per passenger, so always choose coach. Next, minimize the length of your trip by flying the most direct route, and minimize carbon-heavy takeoffs, landings, and ground operations by flying nonstop. If you’re traveling solo, flying nonstop coach is actually better than driving any car—regardless of the distance traveled.

Get on the bus. No matter how many people are traveling with you, a bus pays the biggest environmental dividends. A couple traveling by bus, for instance, generates between 50 and 75 percent less carbon than flying or driving (especially on trips under 500 miles). Bus fares are often cheaper than airline tickets, and many now have similar amenities.