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Now don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas as much as the next person. Unwrapping presents, all the food, cards, and happiness. Now imagine a Christmas with all of this plus more! A Christmas where you can at the end of it know that you have helped the planet, instead of adding to its destruction.

Over 80,000 tonnes of wrapping paper is used each year - equating to chopping down over 50,000 trees. The vast majority of Christmas wrapping paper sold is not recycled, and the trees which are cut down to produce it are very often ancient rainforests. Every day, more and more species of trees become extinct due to deforestation.

Is this necessary? Can’t we find a better way to do this? The answer is yes - and very easily! I suggest buying organic cotton bags and putting the present inside. This has a two-fold benefit - there is no paper used, and the bag can be used in the future for groceries at the supermarket!

If this isnt appropriate to the present you are giving, then using newspapers is a great idea. Tie it up with a reusable ribbon, and the newspaper and ribbon can be recycled and used again.

Over 800 million Christmas cards are sent each year. A few years ago I stopped with sending cards out at all. Imagine - 50 friends, 50 cards, 50 envelopes, 50 stamps, 50 more letters to be delivered to my place - meaning 50 more carbon footprints getting there. These days, I barely ever receive post at all. Almost everything is emailed to me, including pay slips, bills, and, yes, that’s right, even my birthday cards are ecards!

Most Christmas cards end up in the bin anyway - but if you must send cards - then at least buy cards where part proceeds go to charity and use recycled envelopes. 

Christmas is a fantastic time of the year and tiny steps like these aren’t going to make a big difference to you. If we all thought this way, these tiny steps would make a big, big difference.  

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 8:27 pm and is filed under Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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