Humble News: Impact of the Christmas Holiday
Holiday season is in full swing and we are beyond thrilled to be spending our first holiday season with our HEI community. While we do love the festiveness that is Christmas, this most celebrated holiday around the world do have some environmental impacts that we all tend to gloss over in the “spirit of” giving and merriment.
Is Christmas really the most wonderful time of the year or is it “the world’s greatest environmental disaster”? We aim to understand better and share the knowledge so we can all make collective strides to make Christmas more merry and less a season of overconsumption, abundance that leads to excess and waste.
In the USA alone, families are estimated to spend 60% more of their income in celebration of the holidays, wherein almost half of those are treated as waste, thrown out and fill up the landfills. Compared to a normal day, 25-30% more waste is said to be produced during the holidays with a rough value of about $25 million tons of garbage, which is about 100 million garbage bags all dumped in the landfill in just a month’s time.
So what are the factors that contribute to Christmas being tagged as a “wasteful” holiday?
1. Gift Packaging
Gift wrappers, ribbons, bubble wraps, shopping bags, greeting cards and so much more - all these single-use “gifting” packaging used to make gifts prettier are the top contributors to waste during Christmas. It is said that about 1 BILLION cards go straight to the bin, about 125,000 tons of plastic packaging and about 2.3 million pounds of wrapping paper fill up the landfills. And while paper can be recycled, very little is actually kept and reused.
2. Food Waste
As with every big holiday, people gather indulging in food and drinks. According to the USDA, Americans typically waste about 30-40% of their food supply but this number hikes up 25% during the holiday season effectively wasting about 1.3 billion tons of food, valued at $1 trillion.
3. Returns
Makes sense that for a season of gifting it follows that Christmas also becomes a season of returns. All the carbon foot print created in gifting and returning said gifts is immeasurable but according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), returns account for five billion pounds of waste sent to landfills and 15 million metric tons of carbon emissions every year in the US alone. While we assume that items we return are just resold, this is not usually the case, most companies (like Amazon) send returned products straight to the landfills as it takes more money and manpower to restock those returned items.
4. Christmas Decorations
From plastic, disposable and single-use trees, decorations, Christmas lights and special themed place settings, all these Christmas ornaments contribute to insurmountable waste and carbon emissions. It said that an artificial tree needs to be kept (and re-used) for about 20 years to be able to balance out its environmental impact to that of a real tree. An average of 7 million trees (mix of fake and real) per year are disposed in landfills creating around 100,000 greenhouse gases compounded for years. Even Christmas lights, while pretty to look at can consume energy that can power 400,000 homes for a year and emit a huge amount of carbon dioxide to fill up 15,500 hot air balloons.
5. Travel
December usually has a high demand for travel to be with family and friends and its totally okay, it is even encouraged to surround yourself with loved ones to avoid holiday blues. But just be cautious of the environmental impact and plan your trips ahead and accordingly, such that - carbon emissions and pollution from flights are worse compared to a train ride, shorter flights also emit more pollution on a per kilometer rate. So just be mindful of these type of information and make the necessary adjustments when possible.
After unpacking all these, we will be talking about ways to mitigate these factors as well as some tips to help you live a Truly Green Life this holiday season in our next post. Bookmark this site and stay updated with all our updates! We would also love to hear from you, so leave a comment or message below.
Sources:
*https://lbre.stanford.edu/pssistanford-recycling/frequently-asked-questions/frequently-asked-questions-holiday-waste-prevention
*https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs?ref=affiliatesection
*https://www.unep.org/resources/report/unep-food-waste-index-report-2021
*https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/national-overview-facts-and-figures-materials?campaign=affiliatesection#Landfilling
