6 Ways to Reduce Your Household Waste This Christmas
The mass commercialisation of Christmas can be traced back as far as 1930s when Christmas parades, gift-giving, and even Coca-Cola advertising campaigns first rose to popularity. In recent years, this commercialisation of the religious celebration has started to leave a noticeable mark on the environment. The growth of online shopping and promotional trends like Black Friday and Cyber Monday have augmented gift-giving and consumption tendencies around Christmas. According to the Bank of England, Christmas consumption results in average household expenditure increasing by £740 in the month leading to Christmas – that’s a 29% increase from the average monthly household expenditure for the rest of the year. Unsurprisingly, this increased spending and consumption results in huge amounts of waste; an accumulation of food waste, discarded packaging, unwanted gifts, and a variety of other sources.
With this in mind, many environmentally conscious consumers may find themselves asking how they can celebrate the holiday period and partake in family traditions without increasing their environmental impact. This article offers some tips and advice on how to reduce waste in your household this Christmas (and maybe even save some money along the way too).
Manage Waste Through Purchasing Decisions
1. Shop Local
If you’ve left your Christmas gift-buying to the last minute or you’re worried your online order won’t arrive before the big day, this tip is for you. With postal strikes and uncertainty in delivery times, many people have opted to shop locally in 2022 rather than shopping online. Not only will this help boost shops in your local community, it is also a great way to reduce your environmental impact. Favouring local independent stores over national chain stores gives you the opportunity to pick up some gifts that have been produced in the local community, rather than in factories that are often located thousands of miles away. Products produced locally often have reduced environmental impact because the emissions associated with transporting the product to the end consumer are much smaller. Furthermore, purchasing products in local stores rather than shopping online is a great option to limit your household waste, by avoiding all the unnecessary plastic and carboard packaging associated with online delivery companies.
Asides from purchasing gifts, shopping locally can also be a great way to reduce the environmental impact of your food/grocery shop. Using local greengrocers, butchers, and bakers allows you to stock your fridge and cupboards with locally sourced foodstuffs. Produce from these local independent outlets often have lower food miles and higher environmental standards than supermarket alternatives that are sourced from farms located much further away.
2. Buy loose fruit & veg
Another benefit of buying local produce is that local fruit & veg shops often offer loose fruit and veg rather than those pre-packaged in plastic. Whether you are shopping in your local fruit & veg shop or in a chain supermarket, buying loose fruit and veg rather than pre-packaged is another great way to reduce waste this Christmas. Given that you use a reusable bag, this immediately eliminates plastic waste by avoiding unnecessary plastic packaging around items such as potatoes and carrots (reusable mesh fruit & veg bags are now readily available in most UK supermarkets). On top of this, buying loose fruit and veg is also proven to reduce food waste. By filling your own reusable bag rather than buying pre-packaged fruit and veg, you can better control the quantities you purchase. This reduces food waste as you will no longer purchase more portions than you need in oversized supermarket packages.
Manage Waste Through Usage Decisions
3. Avoiding Perishable Food Waste
7 in 10 people in the UK admit they buy more food than they need at Christmas. This results in 4.5 million tonnes of food waste ending up in landfill over the Christmas period – equating to 25 million tonnes of Greenhouse Gas emissions. With this in mind, here are a few ways you can limit your food waste this Christmas.
In the days following Christmas, households often find themselves disposing of large quantities of perishable food products. The best way to limit this type of food waste is of course to curb your purchasing behaviour and make sure you don’t buy more than you need. This, however, is often easier said than done, so if, in the aftermath of Christmas, you find yourself with surplus fresh foods that are about to perish, here are some ways you can give them a new lease of life and save them from the compost. Firstly, almost-spoiled foods are often essential ingredients in baking; we all know over-ripe bananas are perfect for baking banana bread, and sour milk is a great ingredient in baking things like pancakes (or even making your own ricotta). Beyond baking with almost-spoiled ingredients, Megan Morris suggests a host of tactics to save perishable items from the food bin this Christmas – from pickling and freezing, to making fresh smoothies. Check out her full article here: https://www.eatthis.com/food-spoilage/ for more ideas.
Secondly, circular economy apps like Olio allow you to share food with people in your local area before it goes to waste. If you find yourself with more food than you can eat this Christmas, why not sign up and share your excess food with neighbours rather than throwing it away. Alternatively, if you’re having a post-Christmas cupboard clear-out and have over-estimated the amount of long-life foods you needed, you can always take items like dried and canned foods to your local foodbank. This reduces food waste and gives help to families who may be in desperate need of the extra food products.
4. Christmas Cards & Wrapping Paper
Although wrapping presents and writing Christmas cards are inherently linked with the festive period, both of these traditions result in large amounts of paper waste. The average UK household uses 4 rolls of wrapping paper every Christmas, most of which goes straight in the bin after gifts have been opened – that’s a lot of waste paper. This year, reduce your environmental impact by purchasing fully recyclable wrapping paper or, better yet, eliminate your paper waste entirely. Why not conceal presents within a sealed reusable gift bag rather than wrapping each present individually to reduce paper waste. Alternatively, try saving wrapping paper, ribbons, and gift tags to reuse in the future by carefully unwrapping presents to preserve these items rather than ripping them up
Similarly, instead of discarding of this year’s Christmas cards, hold onto them to reuse in the future. Test your artistic skills by turning Christmas cards from last year into gift tags for this year. This is an especially fun activity for families with young children and it saves some money as you don’t need to buy new tags for presents every year
Manage Waste Through Disposal Decisions
According to research from the British Heart Foundation (BHF), 1/3 of households in the UK throw away furniture, electrical items, and homeware goods which are of good enough quality to be reused or recycled. Unsurprisingly, a lot of these disposal decisions occur around the Christmas period when families receive gifts or buy new items which make old household items obsolete. Have you been gifted a new sofa, TV, or coffee machine this Christmas and no longer have use for your old one? Rather than sending your obsolete household items to the dump, there are a number of ways you can give your old items a new home, helping your local community or making some extra pocket money all while reducing your environmental impact.
5. Donating Unwanted Items
Firstly, charity shops like the BHF are always looking for donations of household items that have reuse value to sell and raise revenue for their charitable causes. Many charity shops now offer collection and delivery services for household items so this may even save you the difficulty of transporting bulky items to the dump (and support a worthwhile cause in the process). If your local charity shop doesn’t have use for your bulky items or doesn’t offer a collection service, apps like Freecycle offer a second opportunity to give your old items a new home rather than dumping them. Freecycle allows you to advertise products to other members in your local area who can collect the items for free. (This is also a great platform for anyone who has recently moved home or decided to do some re-decorating over the Christmas period – you can pick up some household items for free and limit your environmental footprint because using second-hand items is always more sustainable than shopping for brand new products).
6. Selling Unwanted Items
Alternatively, if you want to make some money from disused household items rather than donating them, there are a number of apps and websites that allow you to sell them through the circular economy. Ebay and Facebook Marketplace are great options for selling larger household items and electronic appliances; other apps like Depop and Vinted are quick and easy to post listings of unwanted clothing and other accessories (great for giving new life to unwanted gifts if you’ve missed the deadline for returns).
We hope these tips help you have a slightly greener holiday period while still enjoying all your usual family traditions. Any ideas of your own that we may have overlooked in this article…? Please drop us an email to mail@plasticbusters.org and let us know!.
Written By David Gilliand
References:
https://www.yorwaste.co.uk/how-to-reduce-waste-at-christmas/
https://metro.co.uk/2022/11/27/how-much-does-the-average-family-spend-at-christmas-17735281/
https://food52.com/blog/20164-how-to-make-cheese-from-sour-milk