Sustainability: Eco-Friendly Ideas for a Greener Holiday

The holiday poses a dilemma for sustainably-minded individuals. 

On the one hand, it’s “the season of giving,” and you don’t want to be a Scrooge. If your family is used to lavish celebrations, gift-giving can be a kind of sacred obligation, and you don’t want to disappoint by going against the grain. 

On the other hand, you know that much of this splurge will end up in the landfill. Walking down the aisles of a big box warehouse store, past towering pallets of toys and decorations, you feel the burden of all this future trash weighing you down as you sigh and stock up on gifts and seasonal treats. 

In fact, Americans do produce more trash between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day—about 25% more. We spend $2.3 billion a year on wrapping paper alone. 

There has to be a way for you to align with your sustainability values during the holiday season and be able to celebrate in a way that honors your family and cultural traditions. 

Ideas for Sustainable Gift Giving

Holiday Cards

You probably already know you can send an e-card. Companies like Blue Mountain make it easy to customize digital cards and videos for every major American holiday, including Kwanzaa and Diwali. 

But what if you prefer the old-fashioned process of licking a stamp and envelope so your friends and family have something to decorate their mantle?

One option is to make your own cards. If you go to a craft store to pick up the materials, you’re doing it wrong. Your first two stops should be the thrift store and your local Buy Nothing group, where you can pick up crafting materials at low or no cost. The library is another potential source of free materials. The one in my town regularly gives away old books that are too damaged for the shelves but whose beautiful illustrations would be great in a holiday collage.

You might even luck into a batch of unused vintage cards, at a thrift shop, still with the original envelopes—the perfect way to upcycle. 

“Secret Santa” Gift Exchanges

What do you give someone you barely know in order to maintain positive office vibes? The answer is usually something no one wants. Therefore, would it be a crime to regift a present you received elsewhere, as long as it otherwise fits the rules of the exchange? I don’t think so. 

Much better, though, is to give gifts your office mates will really use. A small bottle of aged balsamic, a jar of caviar or saffron threads, real maple syrup from Vermont—these “boring” gifts will be appreciated (especially if you do some research about food preferences first). They also tend to come in minimal packaging, an added bonus.

Gifts for Friends and Family

Food still works as a more sustainable gift for loved ones, especially if it is something you made yourself or know the person loves. 

Here are some additional ideas:

• Give experiences rather than things. This could be anything from a National Park pass, movie tickets, or a sustainable cruise. When asked what they most regret later in life, people never say, “I didn’t give my aunt enough mugs.” They regret not spending time with the people they love, creating memories that last.
• Make a donation to their favorite cause. One year, I gave everyone two things—a scratch-off lottery ticket and a donation to a charity I knew had meaning for them. If you love the idea of giving something tangible, check out Heifer International, which lets you buy an animal that will provide a family in the developing world with an additional source of income. 
• Stop giving adult gifts altogether. Only giving gifts to the children in the family can have a lot of impact without significantly changing holiday traditions. It’s also a great way to avoid overspending on the holidays.

Environmentally Friendly Holiday Decorations

A lot of the trash generated during the holiday season is purely decorative. Aside from those annual mountains of wrapping paper Americans use, decorating the house and creating holiday displays in your yard can be a huge waste of resources and energy as well.

Remain in Light 

One of the main barriers to celebrating a sustainable holiday season is holiday lights. A single strand of outdoor incandescent lights costs about $15 to run, assuming it is on for 12 hours a night throughout the holiday season. 

Switching to LED lights will cut your energy output significantly—LEDs use about one-sixth the amount of energy that incandescents do—as will using your remaining incandescent light strands and blow-up displays more responsibly. A few hours a night should be enough to impress your neighbors. When the incandescents burn out, replace them with LEDs so that you don’t put perfectly good items in the landfill.

Real or Artificial?

Did you know that the arboreal forests are no longer helping to reduce our carbon burden? We think of them as CO2-consuming machines, but because of fires and poor forestry management, forests are, at best, carbon neutral. 

That’s a fancy way of saying it’s okay to get a real tree. Just make sure that you dispose of it correctly. Many cities will pick up your tree, chip it, and create mulch that people are able to use free of charge when the planting season starts. Bonus points if you purchase your tree from a farm that uses sustainability practices. 

It’s a Wrap

The big problem with wrapping paper is that most of it is not recyclable. It contains plastic, sparkles, and glitter – none of which are environmentally friendly. So, most of that paper goes straight into the landfill. 

Alternatives to traditional wrapping paper are:

• Children’s drawings: which are great for doting relatives.
• Fabric: unless you have yardage left over from completed projects, thrift shops are a good place to find holiday colors and patterns that can be repurposed as gift wrapping.
• Tin and baskets: a vintage cookie tin doubles as a thoughtful gift when you use it to conceal the “real” present.
• Paper shopping bags: you can stamp patterns on the gifts or tie them up with twine for a more sophisticated look. 

How Businesses Can Practice Sustainability During the Holidays

You don’t have to mindlessly buy into the holiday hype just because you think it will boost customer and employee goodwill. Instead, you can create new traditions by dipping your toes in the circular economy—that is, you can pledge to stop prioritizing the linear progression of products from manufacture to landfill and choose shipping, production, and retrieval methods that are more sustainable. 

The more businesses step up, the more customers will feel heard and supported. Although Gen Z and millennial shoppers value sustainability initiatives the most, 68% percent of Americans now say that they would purchase a product that was manufactured and delivered sustainably over one that was not. 

Having a business care about sustainability during a period of commercial excess may seem gimmicky—and it will be, if your intent is to do the bare minimum only for show. 

But what if you were to use the holiday season to launch a bonafide sustainability initiative, a gift to the planet, if you will? You would be in good company. Apple has pledged to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030 and is releasing its first carbon-neutral products just in time for the 2023 holiday season. 

Apple’s 2023 is a good model even for small business owners who want to behave more sustainably. The company sets a clear goal: carbon neutrality by 2030. Moreover, they are pursuing this initiative across the board, making changes to product design, manufacture, supply chain, shipping, and the recommission of defunct products. Apple illustrates the concept of “every bit counts” when they do things like pledging to ship 50% of their products by means other than air and remove leather from all their product lines. 

What are some of the first steps your small business can take to make the holiday season greener?

A good focus for any business that relies on e-commerce is shipping. Global shipping and e-commerce use about 3% of the world’s total carbon emissions. One way to ameliorate that loss is to make sure that the product is packaged using recycled materials. Packaging can also be its own bonus gift—the package that a shirt comes in can double as a reusable shopping bag. 

As a small business owner, your new holiday traditions should actually work toward the goal of carbon neutrality. That includes what you serve at the holiday party (and how you serve it—no paper plates!), how you choose decorations, and what kind of gifts you give employees. Much of the advice I give above also applies to a corporate or business setting.

Ultimately, if you are genuinely concerned about becoming a sustainable business, you’ll dive more deeply into the circular economy. But for now, you can just focus on making less trash.