Simple Sustainable Swaps to Reduce Waste this Festive Season

Whether we’re breaking bread with family and friends, or trading gifts with our loved ones, there’s much to celebrate during the festive season – but with the UK typically producing and discarding an extra 30% of waste throughout the holiday period, we’ve put together our top tips for a green Christmas.  

If all of us make small changes to our usual Christmas routines, we can collectively create a huge impact when it comes to reducing waste this year.

Thoughtful Gift-Giving 

For many of us, gift-giving is an important festive tradition – but sometimes presents run the risk of remaining unused and eventually thrown away. If you want to take a more sustainable approach to gift-giving, consider arranging an experience you can share with a loved one, making a donation to charity on their behalf or even cooking them a festive meal.  

Another advantage is the time you will save not having to wrap presents, and as around 50,000 trees are cut down each year to make Christmas wrapping paper, this will be a big win for the environment too.    

Reuse and Repurpose your Decorations  

Instead of going out and buying new decorations, we can find creative ways to give a new lease of life to what we already own. That way, we can save our pennies, while also reducing waste.  

Replacing old or broken decorations might seem like a harmless activity, but the amount of Christmas fairy lights alone thrown away each year would span 70,000 miles, Simply switching the placement of where you usually put things, repairing old fairy lights or getting crafty by painting and embellishing worn-out decorations can create a completely new look out of what you already have.    

Reduce Food Waste 

If you’re hosting Christmas dinner this year, it can be tempting to overbuy food in the lead up to the big day. TV adverts and busy supermarkets can really pile on the pressure, but a lot of this food actually ends up being wasted – per household, approximately one plateful of food is wasted on Christmas day alone! Luckily, this can be easily avoided with some careful planning and communication. Asking your guests about their dietary requirements and preferences beforehand can eliminate the need to cater for all possibilities, allowing you to just buy the food that you know people will eat. 

It's also worth considering the packaging options when choosing your festive treats. Larger chocolate bars and cakes require less packaging than individually wrapped ones, and they are also much more likely to be recyclable.     

Ditch Single-Use Tableware 

In the lead-up to the big day, festive-themed napkins, paper plates and disposable tablecloths are readily available to buy from supermarkets and shops. With the pressures of cooking Christmas dinner, these single-use items can seem like a fun option that saves on the washing up, but once the big day is over they will be thrown away after just one use. By utilising Christmas decorations that you already own as table pieces, and opting for fabric table cloths that can be rewashed and reused year after year, you can create a Christmas-themed table setup without the waste. 

It's also worth rethinking popular festive additions to the dinner table such as Christmas crackers. Although they’re a fun way to get into the festive spirit, 99 percent of Christmas cracker gifts end up in the bin at the end of the day. Table party games are a waste-free alternative that will have your guests talking and laughing in no time.  

Rework Last Year’s Christmas Wardrobe 

Christmas jumper days, office parties and festive get-togethers are all brilliant ways to celebrate the season. While the pressures of advertising may make it seem like you need to go out and buy something new, most of us probably already have a festive outfit from last Christmas that hasn’t been worn since. An estimated 336,000 tonnes of used clothing is thrown away each year by people living in the UK, so more of us choosing to reuse what we already have is an important step towards reducing this. Giving your forgotten outfits a new lease of life is also a great way to beat the Christmas shopping rush and save yourself some stress and money!