Greeny not Grinchy

This year, don’t be Grinchy towards the environment with your holiday giving. The holidays can be famously excessive. All the traveling, shopping and eating not only expand your waistline, but they also impact the environment. As we enter the holiday season, we decided to devote a few weeks to the ways that we can all easily adjust our typical wasteful holiday habits.

One of the major culprits of the holiday season are the ungodly amounts of trash we produce during it. Wrapping paper, Christmas cards, bags, packaging all massively contribute to the holiday season being the worst time of the year for the environment…so THIS WEEK, we’re talking about ways to trim the trimmings and reduce our waste (not waist…sorry).

First, the scary facts: Americans throw away an additional 5 million tons of trash (25% more than usual) between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve . It just sounds disgusting. But when you realize that it takes 6 mature trees to make just 1 ton of paper and 4 MILLION tons of our holiday excess waste is from shopping bags, boxes and gift wrapping , you start feeling disgusting, too. That’s 24 MILLION TREES Americans will waste this year alone on paper goods for the holidays (we are not including Christmas trees…we’ll get to that later this month). And if you don’t remember how important trees are to us all, check out all the stats from our November 12 posting below.

Here’s our ideas for greening up your gift-giving:

Use “Smart” Wrapping Paper
If everyone in the U.S. wrapped 3 gifts in reused paper this holiday season, it would save enough paper to cover 45,000 football fields . That’s 2,592,000,000 square feet of paper we could save. Wrap your presents this year in old newspapers, brown grocery store bags or tissue you have accumulated from shopping for gifts. Or don’t wrap and draw or paint a little something directly on the box for pizzazz. Use an old ribbon from a previous gift, you get the idea. Try not to buy anything new this year to wrap presents in, use what you have. (But if your joy in life comes from wrapping paper, at least look for recycled paper.)

Even better than being smart about wrapping your own presents? Getting other people to be smart about it too! Tell your mom, sig other, grandparents and Aunt Susie that you really appreciate their holiday gifts, but that you are PERFECTLY HAPPY if it is not in shiny paper. We don’t want to take the fun out of opening a present that you really, really want (like a Cartier love bracelet, hint hint) but you’re not 8. The love bracelet will look just as good on you not wrapped.

And if your family can’t part with its ribbons, bows and Santa paper, then PLEASE reuse or recycle it all! Save the pretty bows, boxes and bags for you to reuse for the next time you have to give a gift. Recycle everything else. Even if your family doesn’t usually do that, just make it your personal goal to collect it all and set it aside to be picked up (or if they don’t have those fab blue trash cans, go ahead, don’t be lazy and drop it off at a recycling center).

Holiday Cards
Remember when you were little and your mom used to tell you that the card was more important than the gift itself? We beg to differ…Over 2.65 BILLION holiday cards are sold each year in the U.S. The amount of cards could fill a football field 10 stories high (we know, we know, what’s with all the football field analogies?) . If we each sent one card less, we'd save 50,000 square tons of paper . Obviously we’re not suggesting that you ditch out on letting you loved ones know how you feel this holiday season, so here are our suggestions:
• Send e-greetings to family, friends and business associates who are on-line (http://www.bluemountain.com/.)
• Buy recycled-content cards and envelopes.
• Write it on the gift itself (or, if you wrapped your gift in a reused brown paper bag, you can write it on that in a pretty colored pen)
Holiday Shipping and Packaging

For your local friends: Buy Local, Give Local:
Support local bookstores, coffee shops and clothing stores by buying your gifts from them and giving them to people by hand. It helps the little guys and cuts down on shipping and packaging. Also, ask the sales associates to give you size appropriate bags.

For the Out of Towners:
Give e-gift cards instead of sending gifts--trust me people really want to pick out there own cds, cloths, music and toys. Email or snail mail a gift certificate from a favorite store (like Amazon.com, where they donate a small portion of the sale to us if you use our link!) and they can pick out their own gifts. If someone ships you a present, recycle the waste. And if you really want to be a saint save packing "peanuts" and bring them to a mailing company such as Mail Box Etc. for them to be reused.

If you have any ideas about reusing and reducing holiday waste this season, feel free to post below! Also, please check out our next few weeks of holiday eco-tips, including great ideas and links for eco-chic gift ideas and clothing.

Finally, give GREEN IS THE NEW PINK the best holiday gift of all—new subscribers. Forward our email to all your friends and encourage them to subscribe, too. The more subscribers we get, the more people doing the tips, the more we will all change the world this year!