Together’s tips for a greener Christmas
Christmas doesn’t always have to put a serious hole in your finances. With the help of our friend Polly Ghazi, author of The Low Carbon Diet, we’ve put together some imaginative ideas to make this Christmas a little easier on the wallet and the planet
Low impact gifts
- Try your hand at homemade presents or give the gift of time.
- Make elderly relatives and busy friends a voucher, pledging to dog walk, garden or babysit for them once a fortnight.
- Enrol the kids in making home-made jams and Christmas cakes as gifts for teachers and neighbours.
- For more traditional gifts to unwrap try carbon-friendly products, such as wind up radios and torches, recycled content toys and clothes or energy efficient gadgets.
- Take winter walks and forage around for holly and mistletoe to decorate fireplaces and doorways.
- Make coloured chains from recycled paper rather than buying yards of tinsel.
- Decorate your tree with hand gathered glitter-dipped pinecones, ribbon bows and home-made gingerbread men.
- You can easily find wrapping paper and cards with a recycled content these days.
- And don’t forget to recycle them again once it’s all over. Last year an estimated 83sq km of Christmas paper was dumped in UK rubbish bins.
- If your local council recycles Christmas trees you can also give yours a new lease of life as wood chips.
- When shopping for the Christmas feast, remember your re-usable bags.
- Wherever you can buy produce that is local and in season rather than flown for thousands of miles – think Brussels sprouts, potatoes, parsnips, cabbage.
- Avoid heavily packaged produce when you can buy the same thing loose.
- If you can, compost those mountains of vegetable peelings
