Dec 2018: Doing the Decorations

Hi All! Welcome back to The Sustainable Millennial blog. This post is a bit early in the month of December, but purposefully. As the holiday season is upon us, most of us are focused on the gifts, meals, and family and friends we’ll see. Perhaps second on our minds are the decorations that we plan to put up in our homes and work places. While decorations may seem less important, today’s blog post is dedicated to discussing whether the decorations we choose are truly the best in terms of sustainability!

From my experience, most holiday decorations bought “on a whim” or “last-minute” to decorate office spaces or living rooms tend to be made of plastic. Even if holiday decorations are bought months in advance and are intentionally bought for the season, they are usually composed of plastic. These items are commonly bought from stores such as 99 Cents Store, The Dollar Store, or even local grocery stores. Examples of such plastic holiday decorations can be seen below:

Plastic Decorative gourds/vegetables

Plastic string lights with plastic leaves

Small artificial Christmas Trees

Pack of plastic ornaments

While some of these items may be cute, their cheapness often comes with a price. Even if plastic decorations are durable and could be reused year to year, they will eventually contribute to a landfill. Why is this? Many plastic decoration items can only be donated to thrift stores, not recycled. Why does this matter? Plastic’s long-lived qualities make it a hard substance to break down in a landfill, taking hundreds of years to decompose. This seems a bit excessive compared to how many years (or days) a person actually uses the item. My Recycling 101 post also discusses the limited size and number of landfills within the U.S. This is especially troubling given that “between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, American household waste increases by more than 25 percent”. To learn more about this general trend, read this insightful article here.

The best way to reduce your environmental impact long-term is to simply buy or make decorations that are plastic-free, which can more easily break down in a landfill (decompose) when thrown away (or otherwise be recycled). Such materials include wood, (sometimes) metal, but most importantly REAL plants (like leaves from outside)! :) Plants are naturally nice to be around, and when the season ends, plant materials can easily be composted too. Examples of such alternatives are shown below:

Real Decorative Gourds/Squash

Table runner made with real leaves!

Small Real Christmas Trees

Wooden ornaments

As seen in one of the examples above, live Christmas trees are a real eco-friendly treat for your home. You can find a great selection of these for sale at Home Depot, or you can even RENT them and have them replanted every year for reuse in future years (ultimate sustainability)! One Southern California option can be found here and one Northern California option can be found here.

The holiday season doesn’t need to be unnecessarily unsustainable. By decorating with more sustainable/biodegradable materials, you are cutting down on your holiday-related waste and reducing your “environmental footprint”. By supporting the health of our environment, I believe we support each other. I would say that’s in spirit of the holidays. ;)

Feel free to comment below with how YOU will be more sustainable this holiday season!

#sustainable #environmentallyfriendly #reduceplasticuse #sustainableholidays