Christmas Gardening – greening your Christmas

Christmas is the time of year when many things are done to excess and unfortunately that can mean excessive waste, higher energy consumption and a steep increase in greenhouse gas emissions. If you want to enjoy the festive season but also try to reduce your environmental impact think about some of the following:

An average Christmas in the UK can generate as much as 3 million tonnes of waste including around 160,000 tonnes of food waste (this includes over 80 square kilometres of wrapping paper), 6 million trees and approximately 150,000,000 cards and parcels will be delivered every day in the run-up to Christmas.

To reduce your impact:

Decorate an outside tree or a large houseplant or even make a DIY structure from branches and twigs. That will mean one less in the six million conifers that get dumped every New Year.

For most of us however a traditional Christmas tree is an essential part of the festivities so here are a few guidelines to help if you want to make a more eco-friendly choice, try to find a local organic producer, if you have room in the garden why not plant a living tree with roots, so you can plant it out in the New Year, don’t use preservative sprays to stop needle fall because that adds to environmental pollution, instead buy one of the varieties that holds its needles well, and above all, if you have purchased a cut tree – make sure you take it to your recycling centre in the New Year where it will be turned into mulch and chippings used in municipal parks.

Christmas gardening dead tree photograph by g-hat, used under a creative commons attribution licence