My Christmas Garbage Count

With all the gift buying, packaging, wrapping, shipping, greeting cards, and eating, it is not hard to see why our garbage volume increases by 25% over the holidays. Here are some other (frightening) gift-giving statistics (based on USA):

4 million tonnes per year of wrapping paper and shopping bag waste (ULS)
An additional 1 million tonnes of waste per week generated during the holidays (EPA)
2.6 billion greeting cards are bought each year (CalRecycle)
33 million live Christmas trees are cut down each year (EPA)

20161229_201756 — My plastic Christmas Tree – going 10 years now

This was the first year I have ever really thought about holiday waste. I made an attempt to curb the waste I generated but this is definitely an area to improve upon in the future.

Here is what I did:

I exclusively re-used gift-bags and tissue that I had saved from previous years. No new wrapping was bought. I also saved any bags from gifts I received to be used next year.
Three of the gifts I gave were used (shh). Bonus was that I saved money too.
I gave one ‘adventure’ instead of a material item.
Two of the gifts I gave were homemade and therefore had zero packaging.
I made sure all packaging from gifts received was properly recycled.
Three gifts were purchased from local sources.

One issue I think I am going to have moving forward is that as much as I try to reduce waste on gifts that I am giving, it is much harder to control gifts that I (or especially my toddler) receive.

Am I going to be that awkward person who saves wrapping paper?

suzanneosborne

Hello, My name is Suzanne and I am a scientist. I obtained my doctorate degree from McMaster University (Canada) where I spent (many) years studying bacteria and how they make people sick. I now work as a researcher at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto where I am investigating how animal and human cells fight back against bacteria and how the bacteria can exploit these defences. During my education I have become increasingly interested in communicating science to others. From my experiences I have often felt there is a large communication gap between scientists and the public; a problem which is probably mostly our fault. Most scientists are bad at communicating about what they do and to make matters worse, most primary scientific literature is written in a technical language making it inaccessible to the public. This blog is my small attempt to help communicate science to anyone who might be interested. Why "The Ribsome?". The ribosome is an essential component of the cell, just as science communication is also essential. The role of the ribosome is to discipher the codes found within our DNA to create all the proteins found in our cells. We call this process "translation" and the goal of this blog is to translate science. Smart eh?

Author archive Author website

December 30, 2016

Recycling, Uncategorized, Zero Waste

environment, garbage, gift, gift-wrap, holidays, homemade, local, packaging, recycle, Zero Waste

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Hierdoom

Finding my way back