West Hartford’s recycling coordinator offers some tips for reducing waste during the holiday season.

By Katherine Bruns

Every year Americans throw away about 25% more trash between Thanksgiving and New Year’s than the rest of the year!

This waste comes from excess and wasted food, shopping bags, plastic and other packaging, wrapping material, cards, decorations, and more. We can reduce our waste this year.

Gift wrapped in a tea towel. Photo credit: Katherine Bruns

Here are 5 tips:

Consider giving gifts of service

• Cook a meal, rake the lawn, babysit
• Experiences like restaurants, concerts, spa, tickets to sporting events
• Memberships to museums

Re-think gift wrap!

• Choose wrapping paper and holiday cards that can be recycled (not metallic or glittery) and are made from recycled content.
• Wrap gifts in brown (recyclable) paper that you can decorate, and collect ribbons over the year to reuse.
• Wrap in festive dish towels, tote bags, and mason jars that can be part of the gift.
• Avoid flashy plastic products like bows and balloons that can’t be recycled.
• Fun Fact: If every family reused two feet of ribbon, it would save enough to tie a bow around the planet.

Shop in person instead of online

• Supports local businesses.
• Reduces emissions. FedEx estimates that over 3 billion packages are shipped during the holidays each year emitting emissions from trucks, planes, and ships getting packages to people. Online shopping necessitates excess trash from the unsustainable use of plastic, Styrofoam, and bubble wrap packaging – all not recyclable.
• Shoppers can try on and get a feel for what they are buying, reducing the amount of returns necessary.
• Experts estimate that retailers throw away about a quarter of their online returns…creating almost 6 billion pounds of landfill waste.(NPR 1/12/22)

Reduce wasted food

• Meal plan! Try this online Guest-imator to calculated exact food needs
• Shop your pantry
• Stick to your shopping list
• Plan for leftovers: save up those carry out containers so you can send food home with guests, prepare to freeze leftovers.

Décor

• Stick to reusable dishes, cutlery, napkins and tablecloths.
• Avoid trendy holiday decorations that will only be tossed and stick to higher-quality items meant to last a lifetime
• Middletown hosted a holiday decoration swap event – something to consider for our community?

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