HAVE YOURSELF A Sustainable Christmas

We can all do our bit to save the planet this festive season

- Amber Bramble

Christmas may be a joyous time of year, but all that revelry and gift-giving (not to mention food!) can lead to a lot of waste. Thankfully, there are plenty of small changes that we can all make to help the planet at Christmastime, says clean-up queen Pip Kiernan...

Why is it important for us to keep sustainability in mind at Christmas?

It’s confronting to think about, but the amount of waste a household produces can actually double during the Christmas period. Unfortunately, most of it is plastic – from shiny wrapping paper to fake Christmas trees, baubles and decorations, not to mention all the extra plastic packaging on our shopping! And we all know the problem with plastic is that most of it never fully disappears – it just breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces, and persists in the environment for centuries.

What are some of the worst ways we create waste over the festive season?

Stocking stuffers and cheap novelty trinkets! Gimmicks, joke stocking fi llers and gag gifts might seem fun at the time, but they’ll end up in the bin soon after the short-lived novelty has worn off. Another big area of waste at Christmas that we often forget about is food. It’s really important to keep uneaten scraps out of our garbage bins because when food ends up in landfi lls, it produces methane, a particularly harmful greenhouse gas.

When it comes to trees, should we go real or fake?