Natural and Sustainable

Here are simple wasy to celebrate the season in a more sustainable way.

You wake up on January 1st with piles of crumpled wrapping paper, tissue paper everywhere in every color imaginable and gift bags laying all around filled with gifts of uselessness that you may only use once or twice before it ends up in a yardsale or donation box the following year. Not only the gifts lay about but also mounds of leftovers. All of this means, mind-boggling amounts of waste.

Americans toss away an extra 2 billion pounds of garbage weekly between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. From an environmental prespective, consumption, wheather of matiureal goods or energy, poses the greatest threat of anything we do on the environment.

Being environmentally conscious also reduces your holiday stress. Cutting back on the overdoing and overspending helps keep your immune system strong and winter-cold-resistance. It also brings more personal value to a celebration. Environment consciousness as taking a step back and focusing on the season. You have all your friends and family around, so take advantage of that and spend time with people rather than focusing on gift giving. Do yourself and the earth a favor: Before you decorate your home, wrap your gifts, and set out your buffet, consider these paths to a happier holiday.

• Decorate Your Tree With Sustainability: Every year, roughly 35 million Christmas trees are cut down and sold, serving a major source of holiday waste. First of all, don’t feel guilty about buying a tree. Trees are grown as a sustainable crop. In fact, 1 acre of Christmas trees produces enough oxygen to support 18 people, and provides habitiats for birds and wildlife. Buying an artifical-tree isn’t a better choice, since most faux foliage is made from earth-toxic PVC. The very best thing you can do is buy a live tree, with a root-ball, not a cut one. Live tress can be found at most nurseries and some tree lots. When the season ends you can plant it in your yard or a park. Whether you go cut or live be sure and always recycle your trees. Being a live one to your garden or a cut one to a local tree recycler. To find one in your own area go to Earth 911 or call you city’s public works department.

• Decorate With The Earth In Mind: Decorating for the holidays is a way to show personal expression, yet so many people fall back on petroleum-based products like tinsel, and plastic lawn ornaments. People not only use these products they also use the old fashion lights that blaze forth waste. We waste 40 precent more energy during the holidays than during the rest of the year by burning lights and doing extra driving.

Look for energy-eicient LED (light-emitting diode) bulbs, which burn just as brightly as regular tree lights by use 5 precent of the energy and last up to 100 precent longer.

Rather than filling the house with store-purchased decorations, which typically are mass-produced, easily broken and destined for landfills, make your decorations personal or biodegradeable such as winter squash and pomegrantes accented with fragrant cinnamon sticks and nutmeg into wreaths and centerpieces. Or buy a biodegradeable wreath made from birdseed for your front door. Let meaningful souvenirs and phtographs take the place of glass and aluminum ornaments on your tree as well.

• Put Some Sustainability Thought Into Gift Giving: Most of the precents you buy in December will be discarded by January. Skipping gifts altogether ay beem Scrooge’ish, but some meaningfullness can be put into the gift other than something “throw away”. First, don’t shop the mall on the day after Thanksgiving, which is the busiest shopping day of the year, by observing Internation Buy Nothig Day. Then consider ways to avoid the shopping ills while coming up with ideas for gifts that mioght actually be appreciated. Handmade gifts are the ones more cherished.

Back in the earlier gift-giving days, manufactured goods become more and more available to the masses, the idea of a store-bought gifts gained ascendant, but that era is now coming full circle. For many, a return to handmade gifts has put the fun back into the holidays. People use and keep nomemade gifts because there’s a memory associated with them. As an alternative, gifts of service such as: Car washing, dog walking, foot massaging, have no environmental impact and plenty of personal significance.

Rather than asking friends and family members wha they want, ask them what they want to do. We often give tickets to shows or concerts, it has a certain intimacy.

•Wrap It Up Earth-Friendly Ways: If you take the time to come up with personalized gifts, it’s a shame to not use better wrapping paper to wrap it up with, pasticularly when you are trying to think more green. The paper industry has one of the largest ecological footprints in the world. Using recycled paper is very, very important to do during the holidays. You not only reduce forestry waste, you also reduce water, energy and global warming impacts.

Americans waste more paper during the holidays during any other time. Christmas card waste could be cut back by a 10 precent reduction in the already 750 million greeting cards sent anually. This cut back could save 30,000 trees. And if every household in America reused just 2 feet of ribbon this year, the result would be 38,000 miles saved could be used to tie a ribbon around the Earth. Try to reuse and create your own wrapping paper by using old magazines or newspaper.

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*Natural and Sustainable Living Tip: Always recycle your old print cartridges. HP has an offer for a prepaid envelope to use when you purchase new cartridges to send back to the company your old cartridges for recycling.