HOW TO HAVE A GREEN CHRISTMAS

When my children were at Old Greenwich School, my husband Jim and I would sometimes join them for lunch at the cafeteria. While we enjoyed being with them and their friends at the big round Formica tables, it was heartbreaking when lunch was over to see how much food went from the lunchbox or cafeteria tray into the trash can. Whole sandwiches, nearly full cartons of milk, unopened containers of yogurt and of course there was all that packaging. It has taken years, and we still lecture our kids, but I think as they’ve grown up, they’ve learned to become more responsible about not wasting food.
At Christmastime, I feel similar regret about the amount of gift wrap, greeting cards, packaging, and of course the useless gifts that are discarded like so much unwanted yogurt when the holidays are over.
According to Robert Lilienfeld and William Rathje, authors of the book, Use Less Stuff, (http://use-less-stuff.com) “Americans throw away 25% more trash during the Thanksgiving to New Year’s holiday period than any other time of year.”
It doesn’t have to be this way. With a little thought, I bet we can all come up with a trick or two for cutting back. On their website, Lilienfeld and Rathje list Forty-two Ways To Reduce Your Holiday Wasteline and they back up their suggestions with eye-opening statistics that show how even a little bit can make a big difference. For example;
• The 2.6 billion Christmas cards sold each year in the U.S. could fill a football field ten stories high. Sending one card less would save 50,000 cubic yards of paper.
• Thirty billion tons of edible food is wasted each year. Putting out just one less cookie per person reduces consumption by 2 million pounds.
• Cancelling 10 mail-order catalogues per household, cuts trash output by 3.5 pounds per family per year.
• Re-using just two feet of holiday ribbon saves 38,000 miles of ribbon. That’s enough to tie a bow around the entire planet.
At the Christmas Brunch at our church, members shared their ideas for how to reuse and recycle during the holidays. Perhaps we can all share ideas on this website.
When you think about it, tying a bright green bow around the earth is a great image to keep in mind this Christmas. Because when we act responsibly and reduce our consumption we do nothing less than give each other the world.