Tis the Season to be Wasteful

Posted on Wed Dec 19 2007

By: Heather Utendorf in Environment

The holidays are a joyous times for gift giving, good food, time with family and friends and waste. That’s right, the holiday season seems to send all good environmental intentions out the backdoor like a 3 week old Christmas tree. Here’s a rundown of some very unsettling statistics about the holiday season. Keep this in mind over the next couple weeks and see if you can curb your environmental impact.

• In the UK, the Royal Mail delivers around 150 million cards and packets each day during the pre-Christmas period. It is estimated that up to 1 billion Christmas cards (17 for every man, woman and child) could end up in the garbage across the UK.

• In the United States over 2.5 billion cards. That’s enough to fill a football field 10 stories high. Reduce that number by one card and full story is removed and that saves about 50,000 cubic yards of paper.

• During the Christmas holiday season 30% more waste is produced than in other times of the year.

• 50 million Christmas trees are purchased in the U.S. Of those, 30-plus million get carted to the landfill every year

• The amount of household garbage in the United States generally increases by 25 percent between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day, from 4 million tons to 5 million tons per week.

• In the UK, almost 3,000 tons of aluminium foil to wrap Christmas turkeys.

Although the holiday bring stresses and circumstances different than those you are used to, try to keep your environmental habits as close to normal as possible so you can be part of the solutions, rather than the problem.

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