Conscious Choice: Need an Environmental Holiday? Try a Conservation Celebration

December 2003

Need an Environmental Holiday? Try a Conservation Celebration

by Beverly McClellan

It’s so easy and admittedly fun to get caught up in the consumerism of the holiday season. But often our wish lists include wanting to give family and friends gifts that touch their hearts and respect our environment.

As we celebrate, shop, decorate, wrap (and unwrap) presents, and eat, we also devour resources and churn out the waste. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports that the volume of household garbage increases by about 25 percent between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day — from 4 million to 5 million tons.

In striving for a conservation celebration over the years, I’ve collected ideas from family, friends, and environmentally responsible groups. Consider it my "environmental holiday" gift to you:

Recycle wrapping. Look for recycled cards, wrapping paper, and boxes and re-use last year’s wrapping items. If you can’t find recycled products, buy and recycle paper and cards without metallic or plastic coatings. If we each replaced just one holiday card with an e-mail, we could save 50,000 cubic yards of paper (as long as it isn’t printed by the recipient).

Decorating. Creative package ideas include using the fronts of old holiday cards as gift decoration (start saving now!), decorating white tissue paper with markers or inked leaves or other items for a signature wrapping, and, of course, using colorful newspaper sections. Top your gifts with dried flowers, leaves, or leftover greenery instead of ribbon. I turn paper grocery or holiday shopping bags, especially green or red ones, inside out for wrapping and adorn with the front of a favorite card from last year. One friend even makes her own reusable cloth drawstring holiday bags — now they’ve become a gift themselves!

Energy-efficient lighting. Replace larger, old-fashioned lights with energy-efficient mini-lights. Put them on a timer or turn on only when someone is around to enjoy them. The less electricity we use, the fewer pollutants we release to the environment, such as mercury emitted by coal-burning electric plants. Mercury is responsible for many warnings about eating contaminated fish across the Great Lakes.

Environmental shopping. Bring your own paper, plastic, and cloth shopping bags. Don’t accept new gift boxes — use your supply at home or wrap without a box. Use your legs, a carpool, mass transit, the phone, and Internet to shop. Ship gifts going to one address in one batch.

Eat environmentally. Buy food for holiday meals and gifts that use as little packaging and processing as possible. Buy organic and free-range turkeys, chickens, roasts, and hams or celebrate a meat-free holiday. The average farm confines its animals to small areas, producing a concentrated runoff of waste, including antibiotics and fertilizers, which pollutes our streams, rivers, and lakes.

Conserve trees. Reuse an artificial tree or buy a live tree that can be replanted. Buy locally grown trees to save energy used in transport. Buy a smaller tree; it creates less waste and its shorter growing time means it used less land. Recycle or mulch your tree; if your town doesn’t offer tree chipping, ask why.

Buy hemp products. First, hemp products are not illegal. Second, hemp can make cloth more durable than, and just as comfortable as, cotton. More important, hemp fibers are naturally bright, meaning paper products made from hemp save trees and require no chlorine bleaching. When paper companies use chlorine to bleach wood pulp, the byproduct is dioxin, which has been linked to cancer in humans, not to mention harm to aquatic life. Paper companies are one of the largest groups of polluters of Lake Michigan and its tributaries. Gift ideas include clothing, holiday cards, stationary, and birdseed.

Give recycled. Some of the most personal and unique gifts can be those you make yourself or those made by artists using recycled items. For example, Lauren Becker (www.recycledglassworks.com) turns plate glass, the type usually excluded from recycling programs, into plates and bowls. She even reincarnates traffic lights into vivid plates: red, orange, yellow, and blue (a.k.a. green lights). Buy hats, mittens, and blankets made from recycled wool or denim garments (www.ekologic.com and www.crispina.com). Another company crafts car and bike parts, cleaned with eco-friendly detergents, into unique gifts (www.resourcerevival.com).

Give nontangibles. If you can’t find a suitable recycled gift, give one that doesn’t require new materials or wrapping, such as concert or movie tickets, memberships to museums or favorite organizations, and ice-skating, yoga, floral arranging, or cooking classes.

Give "service" gifts. Give the gift of your time, designing creative certificates for anything from babysitting, massage, a night on the town, gardening, cleaning, and cooking to teaching someone a treasured skill, like piano, basketball, or calligraphy. Consider trading services: planting spring bulbs in exchange for building bookshelves.

Make donations. Find out what matters to your friends and family and make a donation to an organization that would be meaningful to them. Many nonprofit organizations rely heavily on holiday gifts of money, stock, and personal property, even insurance to continue their work. Consider donations to a local organic farm or citizen-based environmental protection group, for example.

Beverly McClellan uses her environmental law degree as an advocate and communications coordinator for the Lake Michigan Federation, the nonprofit citizen group dedicated to protecting the lake and its ecosystem. Find out how you can help protect the lake at www.lakemichigan.org.

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