Recycle Your Holidays – Celebrate in waste-free style

The holiday season brings family gatherings, traditions, company parties, treats around every corner, and heaps of trash. In fact, Americans produce 25% more trash between Thanksgiving and the New Year, yikes! And that doesn’t include the extra swell of recyclables that we all send to the curb during the holiday rush. This year, let’s put the waste-free shell in the nutcracker. Here are a few tips to reduce the holiday trash bulge.

Whether you’re celebrating Christmas, Friendsgiving or Festivus, think about how you can pull it off without sending a slug of food into the trash. On average, 40% of the food we purchase ends up in the trash. The first step is to purchase less. If you’re hosting, check an online portion calculator to help you decide how much turkey you actually need.

Do your best to rightsize other dishes to avoid excessive leftovers. Some hosts have a leftover party and encourage all guests to bring a reusable to-go container to fill with bits of turkey, green bean casserole, and pie. Others send holiday leftovers straight to the pot for a soup or stew. The freezer is also a great option for anything that won’t get eaten in the next three days. Finally, if the baked beans do end up crusting over in the back of the fridge, make a run to a WLSSD food scrap drop site. We’ll compost it for you and keep those resources out of the landfill.

Gifts can be a touchy subject, but they offer another wealth of options when it comes to reducing waste. Skipping the gifts altogether is as waste-free as you can get, but it’s a hard sell in most groups. How about making some guidelines instead? Try mandating that all gifts must be re-gifted from things you already own, no shopping. Love the rush of shopping for the perfect gift? Try limiting it to resale shops instead of standard retailers. This way there’s no extra packaging or wasted resources from producing new stuff. Want to take it a step further? Try requiring gifts to be experiences only, or get your creative juices flowing with all homemade gifts. Once you’ve agreed on a waste reduction strategy, remind your guests to continue the trend when they choose their wrappings. Use an old newspaper, pick up some flour sacks (they are cost effective and a great size for wrapping), or just skip the wrapping altogether.

Decorations can also create a glittery pile of waste. For starters, be sure that you’re reusing decorations from one year to the next. Homemade decorations like popcorn or dried cranberry stringers can also make great waste-free decorations. If you choose a fresh tree, be sure that it traveled the shortest possible distance to get to you, and always drop your tree off for Treecycling after you’re done celebrating. If you choose an artificial tree, keep in mind that it takes about 20 years of use to make up for the resources used to create the tree. Make sure it’s a tree that you will love for years to come. Opt for LED light strands to save energy, and be sure to recycle old lights at WLSSD’s Materials Recovery Center.

And that’s a waste-free holiday season in a nutshell!