Reduce, Re-Use, Recycle Your Way to a Green 2009!!

Christmas is over and whilst we breathe a sigh of relief and put our overworked feet up, what happens to all that festive fall-out that even the greenest of families will produce?

Over Christmas the UK produces an extra three million tonnes of waste. That's a lot! It is all too easy to just put it all in bin bags and leave it out for the dustmen, but with just a little bit of organisation we can re-use or recycle much of our post-Christmas clutter.

Pre-Christmas preparation
Assuming you and yours have been good all year, there will be lots of presents under that tree come Christmas morning. So, preparation is the key. Before the festive season clear out your clutter. Give it away to friends, donate to charity shops or recycle it but please don't throw it away unless you really have to!

Tree
The real / artificial tree debate has raged for a while and I suppose that as long as you re-use your artificial tree for many years, then it becomes greener. But if you think the best bit of Christmas is that real tree smell, then ideally buy a tree with roots that you can plant outside and re-use every year. If you have a young family, this is particularly enchanting as the tree grows with the family.

But what if you don't have green fingers or, like me, are moving in the summer and a living tree is not an option? Try and find a locally grown tree and buy direct from the grower. The following link lists growers near you:

www.christmastree.org.uk/lists/retailindexnew.htm

Well, then, once you have finished with your beautiful real tree or it has completely shed its needles (depending which comes first) what do you do with it? Easy! Recycle it!

Local councils are pretty clued up on this now and most offer a tree recycling area or skips at strategic locations over various dates. Please contact your local council for details. If you can't find them, their contact details should be listed here:

www.letsrecycle.com/info/localauth/recycling_officers.jsp

Christmas Cards
Reducing the amount of cards you send is the best way to start. Some people may be only too glad to be able to mutually strike each other off the list. How about talking to work colleagues about donating towards a good cause instead of sending each other cards? Last year at the school where I work, we clubbed together and bought two pairs of boots for RNLI lifeboatmen. E-cards are another alternative, especially popular with my teenogres.

However, as someone far wiser than me recently said, ‘E-cards are all very well, but you can't hang them over the fireplace can you?' Which is true. I must confess I love receiving cards and no matter how many eco and computer savvy friends I have sending e-cards, Great-Aunt Maud and other non-computer literate family members are going to want to send cards.

So once they have adorned the fireplace, then what? Re-use them first! Cut off the blank backs for scrap paper. Cut up the pretty fronts for labels and cards next year. And then, once you have re-used all you can either put the scraps in the cardboard recycling bag or take the remains to a shop that is offering to recycle your cards for you. Taking cards to some stores will raise money for the Woodland Trust:

www.woodland-trust.org.uk/cards/

Wrapping Paper
Over 8,000 tonnes of wrapping paper are used in the UK over Christmas. That's 40,000 trees!!

So no prizes for guessing what I'm going to say...re-use the old stuff. An easy one here is bottle bags, very easy to re-use, just make your own label. Be different, be quirky, use your imagination. We are using old maps this year that would have just been thrown out from my husband's shop. They look amazing! Be creative with brown paper. Make your own decorations on it with anything you can find. I've used dried orange slices and cinnamon sticks, tied with hemp string. But beads are pretty, and you can even use greenery if you are wrapping on Christmas Eve. If you are crafty you could also make re-usable fabric gift bags.

When you finally get to open your presents, open them carefully, so that the paper can be re-used. Sellotape can go straight on the compost as it is plant based, whereas other brands are mostly fossil fuel based. Any paper that is not re-usable can be shredded (invest in a small shredder) and used as packing for presents over the year. And then if you really can't do anything else, put it out for the recycler.

Presents
No matter how many lists you give people and how many subtle hints you leave for certain people, you are going to end up with presents you don't want. This is an easy one. We have a present drawer to give to people whose birthdays we inevitably forget until the last moment over the year. Although avoid the obvious pitfall here of giving a present back to the person who originally gave it to you!

Alternatively, donate them to a charity shop. But if you are feeling the financial pinch and need to sell your presents on eBay, then as you list your item, chose the ‘donate a percentage to a charity' option. You will find The Big Green Idea on the drop down menu. So everybody gains!

Food
Over the festive season we seem to develop eyes bigger than our tummies and a lot of food goes to waste. An obvious answer here is to invest in a composter. It doesn't have to be a posh dalek-esque type (many styles available from www.recyclenow.com/compost/), although they are good as they heat up the compost helping it to decompose, as well as being made from recycled plastic. My grandfather's compost heap was just as it sounds - a pile of composting vegetable matter in the far corner of his marvellous garden. That was until my grandmother saw a rat! You could also build your own and it can be as basic as four rectangles of wood forming a box shape. Have a look here for some more information on composting.

And finally...

If all your reducing and re-using still leaves you with some waste, then it is time to recycle. All councils should now do door-to-door collections. Even in darkest downtown Dover, where we are ranked an embarrassing 371st out of 394 English councils, www.letsrecycle.com/info/localauth/league/2007ranked.jsp we have a black box for plastics, tins and glass and a blue bag for paper and card.

If you aren't sure what recycling facilities your local council offer, click here.

So Christmas is over and the New Year is here. What better way to start the new year than with a squeaky green conscience. Have a happy, healthy and green 2009.

Jo