The one-bag-a holiday waste plan. The waste generated at the holidays can be substantial. You can recycle, reuse and re-purpose the amount down to one-bag-a-week if you are clever, resourceful and mindful.
Oh Christmas Tree. If you have a real cut tree there are lots of things you can do with it instead of putting it in the trash…
- Take it, stand and all, out in the yard and stand it up in various places to see where you would like to plant a tree. Christmas trees make great models. In the spring, cut off the branches and chip them to make mulch. Use the trunk to make the center pole for a play tent.
- Cut off all the branches and lay them over your garden beds to protect them from heavy snow and the freeze-thaw cycle. In the spring, remove the branches and chip them up. Save the trunk to use as a bird house pole. Bonus: when you cut off the branches hidden ornaments appear on the tree that would have been lost if it had been just thrown away.
- Lay the tree on the ground and make an instant winter habitat for the birds. In the spring, chip up the branches and use the trunk as garden edging.
- If you don’t have a yard, find a friend who does.
- If you don’t have a yard and neither do your friends, many municipalities and waste haulers have special pick up days for Christmas Trees. Give them a call and ask for dates, times and places.
Gift Boxes and Gift Bags
- Use them to wrap up the Christmas Cookies that are tempting you and give New Years treats to our neighbors and friends.
- Save them for all the birthdays, anniversaries and other present giving opportunities during the year…and for next Christmas.
- If they have to be discarded, flatten them and put them in paper recycling so they can become new boxes for you to buy again next year.
Cardboard Shipping Boxes
- Reuse them to: return and exchange presents, ship presents, store stuff, make a fort
- Recycle them making sure to flatten them because the recycling system can’t handle a geometric shape.
Wrapping paper
- Very local recycling. My Mother-In-Law used the same paper over and over every year and it was always perfect. She would use a letter opener to unwrap the presents, carefully slicing the tape. After the present was unopened she would carefully fold the paper. Then she would gather everyone’s folded paper and place the stack in a gift box for storage till the following year. Worked like a charm. It may be too late for you to try this but keep it in the back of your mind for next year.
- Recycle the used paper making sure to flatten the pieces so that the recyclers can handle it properly – the wads of paper you used to throw at each other won’t make it through the system.
- Next year, don’t buy paper. We use old architectural plans to wrap presents. Exposing the printed side looks cool, exposing the unprinted side gives space to personalize the gift with stamps, drawings, sayings… You could use pages from a newspaper, old magazines and coupon flyers, remnants of cloth or even just a beautiful box or gift bag.
- Use the little left over bits to make gift cards.
Christmas Cards
- Recycling them is easy and practical
- Saving them takes up space.
- My children say, send a holiday text, but I like Christmas cards so what to do with them?
- Dissect them. Keep the front of the card and use it as: a gift tag next year OR if it is beautiful, stick it in a frame OR decoupage it to a box and give it as a present next year OR use it as a card next year.
- Reuse the card. I have one friend who keeps past years cards and then sends them back to the same folk years later as a Christmas Memory. She even saves those little pictures people send of their family and sends them back after the kids are grown as another Christmas Memory
- Re-purpose them as craft project fodder. There are tons of craft ideas out there for re-purposing Christmas cards. Go to Google, Pinterest, the library, your grandmother – all have great ideas.
Plastic Shopping Bags
Take them to the plastic bag recycling center at your local grocery store so that they can be recycled.
Ribbon
This may be the only thing in the trash because ribbon can’t be recycled.
So did you meet the One-Bag-A-Holiday Challenge? I hope so because the earth could use a nice holiday too.
