Holiday Sustainability Tips

The holidays are right around the corner, and with them come the tendency to indulge in excess. This year, maintain your respect for the environment and incorporate sustainability into your holiday traditions. Below are some tips on how you can protect our greatest gift, a healthy planet:

• Plan ahead. Plan your errands in advance so that you can reduce the number of trips you make to stores. It helps you get things done and helps reduce traffic congestion and air pollution. Starting a car after it's been sitting for more than an hour pollutes up to five times more than when the engine is warm.
• Think about what you eat. Support local family farmers and merchants who sell organic meats, produce, wine and baked goods. Try an organic turkey or ham for your holiday feast for a change. Not only does it taste better, you'll be doing your part for the planet too.
• Give socially conscious gifts. Shop online stores that promote fair trade such as Global Exchange Fair Trade Online Store, Ten Thousand Villages Fair Trade Online Store, and Grounds for Change Fair Trade Coffee, Tea & Chocolate. (Be on the lookout for a special edition of NC E-News that will provide gift ideas that enable you to support the work of ESNC!)
• Avoid excessive packaging. Give things like theater tickets or gift certificates that do not require a lot of packaging or gift wrapping.
• Maximize your bag usage. While shopping, put all your purchases in one bag rather than getting a separate bag with every purchase.
• Stay away from Styrofoam. Don't use Styrofoam peanuts to package gifts or Styrofoam cups and plates for holiday parties. Styrofoam takes over 1 million years to biodegrade.
• Use energy efficient holiday lights. Now you can decorate your house with LED lights that use 90 percent less energy than conventional holiday lights, and can save your family up to $50 on your energy bills during the holiday season! LED lights are available at many major retailers, including Target, Costco and Ace Hardware.
• Make your own wrapping paper. Most mass-produced wrapping paper is not recyclable and ends up in landfills. Instead, here's a great chance to get creative! Wrap presents with old maps, the comics section of a newspaper, or children's artwork. If every family wrapped just three gifts this way, it would save enough paper to cover 45,000 football fields.
• Get a pesticide-free Christmas tree. Demand is on the rise for Christmas trees that are not covered in chemicals; some growers use 40 different pesticides, as well as chemical colorants. The good news is that there are now a number of tree-farms that sell pesticide-free trees.
• Recycle your Christmas tree. Each year, 10 million Christmas trees end up in the landfill. While your tree won't fit in the recycling bin with your newspapers and bottles, you can recycle your tree: many cities offer programs to turn your tree to mulch or wood chips. Call (800) CLEANUP or visit www.earth911.com to find the tree-recycling program near you.