Living Green
Five Tips for an Eco-Friendly Holiday Season
By Christine Smith
The holidays are an excellent time to reduce our impact on the environment, start new family traditions, and at the same time save money.
Here are five tips to help you capture the spirit of the holidays by making your celebrations Eco-friendly. An Eco-friendly holiday season will enrich your family’s holiday traditions because you’ll be giving back to the earth and instilling the values of sustainable living to your families.
1) Holiday Cards
Do you know that 2.6 billion holiday cards are sold each season? This is enough cards to fill a football field 10 stories high and requires the destruction of 300,000 trees. Consider sending your holiday cards through email. Not traditional enough for you? Then send cards printed on recycled paper, or consider making them. Be creative: you can use heavy paper that you have saved for recycling and glue children’s artwork or old calendar pictures to it.
2) Gift Wrapping
According to the Recyclers Handbook, the U.S. creates over 4 million tons of annual trash from gift wrap alone. If we all wrapped three of our gifts that we are giving this holiday season in re-used paper or fabric gift bags, it would save enough paper to fill 45,000 hockey rinks. This year, for your gift wrapping, try using Eco-friendly wrapping paper, brown bags from the grocery store with pretty ribbon, re-use gift wrapping, or other alternatives to conventional gift wrapping.
3) Lighting
Electricity drains natural resources. To minimize the effect use LED (light emitting diodes) lights. LED is 90% more efficient than traditional lighting, lowers the risk of fire, and last longer. Also consider reducing the size of your outdoor lighting display. A smaller presentation of lights is still attractive and shows the community that you are doing your part to living a green holiday season!
4) Decorating
Use simple supplies and your imagination to make great Eco-friendly Holiday decorations. Don’t know where to start? Colored construction paper can be cut or folded into simple holiday decorations or ornaments. When you’re done, the paper can be recycled. Also, try baker’s clay (made from common kitchen ingredients), and shape and mold it into holiday figures. Color with non-toxic paints or food coloring. Seasonal fruit can be used as decorations, is biodegradable, or can be eaten afterward. Other items that can be used are pine cones, horse chestnuts, and leaves. These all make great decorations and add a natural touch.
5) Green Gifts
The idea here is to think outside the box. Give an experience rather than a material item, such as a concert, sport’s lesson, dinner, a show, etc. When giving a gift-wrapped item consider giving green-friendly items: a reusable lunch bag, canvas grocery bag, reusable travel coffee mug, reusable razors, rechargeable batteries, or a tin full of goodies. These examples should be enough to get your thought process flowing. The idea is to Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle, not only through the holiday season, but year around!
Christine Smith is a Principal, as well as the Director of Marketing for Fine Lions, Inc. Fine Lions specializes in a proprietary Eco-friendly wood graining process that is applied to non wood products to give them the appearance of natural wood. This earth conscious application may be done on exterior and interior doors, garage doors, kitchen and bath cabinets, as well as other surfaces. To learn more, visit http://www.finelions.com.