With less than 50 days until Christmas I’m sure many of you are as excited as as I am. We can get a bit over excited and Christmas is an extra wasteful time of year. So here are 5 easy things to cut down waste and make your festive season a little more eco friendly.
- Don’t use the food that would fedd 5,000 to feed 5 people
According to the website for the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment Irish homes and businesses throw out over €700 of food every year and this peaks Christmas time. The equivalent of thousands of festive dinners are thrown away so a great idea is to serve up a ‘normal’ size portions and serve seconds and thirds if people want them. This means the rather than having lots of food scraped off plates straight into the bin you have things in dishes and saucepans that can be reheated and eaten the next day. And leftovers can also be frozen to use in Jan when money is tight and you want to cut down on your shopping bills. - Shop With less plastic
All this extra food and gift purchases comes extra packaging, so try your best to buy packaging free as much as possible. Shop at local market fruit and veg shops, or get store cupboard essential that you know you will use before it goes off. There are shops popping up round the country that help you reduce your waste significantly especially single use plastics some are Twig Refill Shop, Clonakilty, Cork, Dublin Food Coop, Kilmainham Dublin, The Sustainable Store, Blackrock Market, Noms, Phibsborough, Dublin and of course our very own Pax Whole Foods & Eco Goods, right here in Westport, Mayo. - Wrap Responsibly
Nowadays there are recyclable gift wrap widely available or paper that is recycled or bio degradable. There are also nice alternatives to bows, ribbons and sellotape as none of these can be recycled.
There is a lot of talk about the scrunch test but I found a few of mine were hard to tell. Wrapping paper can only be recycled if it passes the scrunch test – simple paper wrap can be recycled but foil or glitter-decorated paper cannot and needs to go in the general waste. - Give gifts that people want
When talking to people try and note things that they mention they’d like or things they saw so you can get presents people want and won’t dispose of when having a spring clean in 2020. Personally I don’t like giving gift cards but these are a great way to cut down on waste, especially if you buy one from a local shop. A nice idea is to make something especially something edible. Cookies or cake is always a great gift. - Plastic is a problem
We are all aware of the problems plastic causes so can you substitute plastic for something that can be recycled. Instead of a plastic toy maybe a wooden one or substitute plastic dolls for fabric ones. A fabulous alternative is these amazing range of recycled plastic toys. The range of Green toys that are will be in the Lúnasa Pop up shop and soon available on the website are a great start.
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