Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from the Hammond Family!
I know the holidays may look vastly different for many this year, so I’m sending you love and comfort to you during this time. In the spirit of Christmas, I wanted to share our little family’s Christmas morning. This year I did a few things in efforts to be more sustainable during a season that typically, “Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, the amount of trash produced in the United States increases by an estimated 25%—that’s about one million extra tons of garbage each week. Annually, Americans discard an estimated:
38,000 miles of ribbon, or enough to wrap around the planet (with some left for a bow);
$11 billion worth of packing material;
And 15 million used Christmas trees.
When this holiday material is discarded it can be headed to landfills, where, far from making things merry and bright, it undergoes bacterial decomposition, which produces “landfill gas”: a mixture of predominantly greenhouse gases including methane, carbon dioxide, and water vapor. The methane in particular makes landfill gas stand out—landfills are the third-largest source of human-related methane emissions in the United States. Methane, a greenhouse gas with an impact on climate change more than 25 times greater than that of carbon dioxide, is the second-most prevalent greenhouse gas emitted in the United States from human activity.” (Neef)
Instead of using a ton of tissue and wrapping paper, I reused brown shopping bags, twine and some pine sprigs to wrap up presents. Although I did opt to send paper holiday cards, which Neef reports that “Each year, an estimated 2.6 billion holiday cards are sold in the US, or enough to fill a football field 10 stories high. Instead of a traditional card, consider an e-card or a telephone call to friends and family”, I typically don’t send cards, and I really wanted to as a way to keep in touch with loved ones especially with the wild year we had. If you celebrate Christmas, I hope it was wonderful however you spent the day! Now onto the blur that is the time between Christmas and New Year’s Day.
