‘Tis the season of trash

Christmas (or Hanukkah or New Year or whatever you do). The happiest time of the year. But also a time of year where we produce an insane amount of trash and harm our beautiful planet. Is it really that hard to unwrap your presents carefully and save the paper? I guess it must be, since it was estimated that Brits throw out 108 million rolls of wrapping paper every year, and that was back in 2017, so it's most likely only increased by now.

As we all know very well, most Christmas presents (especially gifts for kids -- I have firsthand experience!) go out of household circulation after around six months, and are often pretty flimsy and easily break. It's like our clothes; they're cheap, made in bad conditions (both in terms of the planet and the people) and we stop using them relatively quickly. And think of just how much is used at over the holiday season.

But the thing is: I don't blame you. You don't want to spend a fortune at Christmas. You don't want to spend the holiday season being depressed over the planet. And I get that. I feel it too. That's why it's the big companies who publicise Christmas, or sell huge quantities of clothes and toys, encourage us to take long journeys, and essentially tell us to make the planet a worse place. We all want to have a real tree. We all want to send nice cards. We all want to overeat but still somehow buy too much food. But 8 million Christmas trees are cut down every year. But we send enough Christmas cards that if we placed them alongside each other, they’d go around the world 500 times. But our food consumption over Christmas causes the same carbon footprint as a car travelling 6,000 times around our planet. We need to change, and we need to do it now, and the fact is, it will affect every aspect of your life.