Eco-Friendly Tips for the Holidays

Eco-chic is in! In addition to buying the latest recycled or eco-chic gift for your loved ones for the holidays, practicing some of these tips can help to further reduce your impact on the environment. Enjoy these tips on how to be more eco-friendly during the up coming holiday season:

- Don’t order gifts online if you can help it. Driving your car across town to buy a gift emits much less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than the amount that is emitted by having each gift shipped directly to your doorstep. Also, it’s cheaper and there is less packaging – no extra boxes and shipping labels needed! If you still desire the convenience of mail-order, use sites like this one (http://www.turninglife.com/) which offset their shipping emissions.

- Alter your holiday meals to include more regional and seasonal foods. Commercial grocery store chains ship in many types of fruits and veggies from far away during the winter so that we can have the foods we love year round. This high amount of food transportation causes tons of CO2 to be emitted – just because we can’t grow tomatoes in the US year round, we should be able to sacrifice them for a few months and eat other winter season fruits and veggies that can be grown locally. The types of local produce will vary by region, so visit this site to figure out what is local to you in the winter: http://www.nrdc.org/health/foodmiles/

- Use post-consumer recycled wrapping paper, and reuse tissue paper, gift bags, and anything else you can. It’s senseless to use a plastic coated paper bag once to give your gift to a family member and then throw it away. This is not only an environmental tip which saves paper and reduces waste; it is also a money saver too! In addition, you can prepare for next year by saving the comics of every Sunday’s newspaper to use as wrapping paper this coming year, if you still receive the daily or weekly newspaper. It provides color and fun to a gift while being eco-friendly!

- As the weather gets colder and snow may begin to fall, it can be quite comforting to turn the house heat up so that you will have a toasty house. But curbing your heat use by turning it off when you leave the house and allowing your room temperature to be a little colder in the winter months can save mountains of electricity and money in bills. So, instead of turning up the heat more next time, put on a sweater first to warm up.

- Set your holiday lights on timers so that they don’t stay on all night. It’s not really necessary to have the Christmas tree lights on into the wee hours of night- no one is awake to enjoy them anyways! Also, maybe it is time to replace your old lights with new more efficient LED lights (for example, http://www.holidayleds.com/).

- At holiday parties, try to avoid disposable silverware and dishes. It might be more of a hassle to wash more dishes, but it will drastically cut down on the disposable one-time-use cups and plates.

- Christmas tree: real or fake? There remains a lot of debate on this issue. It takes up to 10 years to grow one tree that is often used for about one month and then discarded. These trees are grown and sprayed with a multitude of chemicals which wash into the environment. Fake trees, however, are also made from plastic and require a lot of fossil fuel inputs. In addition, they are often shipped from other countries. TreeHugger (mentioned below) recommends an alternative would be to buy a potted tree that you can then plant outside after the holiday season.

Here are some other websites with good tips on how to be environmentally friendly during the season of consumerism!

http://www.ecologycenter.org/factsheets/holiday_tips.html

http://www.treehugger.com/giftguide/holiday-tips.php

Just as a friendly reminder, I’m not endorsing any specific products I mention in my blog. These are just examples of what I have discovered in my research.