The Week Following Christmas (recycling, organic, plastic, LED)

[donsabi]

If we really want to see how Americans are caring for their environment then please take notice of the curbside trash the week after Christmas.

Today the news featured a story about Amazon shipping. It is impressive as tons of cardboard boxes speed along many miles of conveyor ending up in the correct shipping container. Tons of cardboard most of which will end up in a landfill and not recycled. Some dead Christmas trees will be recycled into mulch, etc,. but many more will pile up in the dumps. Not to mention the mountains of plastic waste.

I think 99.9% of Americans are well aware of our polluted oceans, air, and overflowing landfills leaching untold chemicals into our drinking water. Yet they continue to order items from sites like Amazon without any thought of the shipping container or the energy, (fuels), expended to deliver that one item to their doorstep.
They will wrap the boxes with miles and miles of wrapping paper, ribbons, and bows that will all end up in a landfill.
So little concerned are we at our excessive energy usage that many decorate their houses with thousands and thousands of lights that waste massive amounts of electricity.

Planning for the proper disposal of Christmas waste items would be a great Christmas present for our planet.

[DCforever]

Disposing of cardboard boxes is the least of our problems.

[Coldjensens]

We throw our Christmas tree in the back yard and let it sit until late spring. the birds love it. Then we make it out first bonfire of the year. We do not even need charcoal starter to get it burning, just a little left over wrapping paper. it is all very green.

[Gerania]

Cardboard is great for keeping down the weeds in the vegetable garden.

[guidoLaMoto]

You've made an observation that deserves some attention:


The curbside piles are a proxy-measure of American consumerism. The American economy is the most active & largest in the world, and consumerism drives it. Without it, our standard of living would not be as high. We would have more poverty, more malnutrition, etc etc.....So we have to be careful about doing anything that we think may be "good for the planet" but would have negative effects on the economy and, thus, negative effects on the well being of the people.


BTW- "Black Friday" gets its name not from the dangers of exposing yourself to a mob of bargain-crazed shoppers, but to the fact that the average retail store doesn't stat making a profit for the year until the Christmas shopping season starts. "Black" as in black ink (profit) vs "Red" for red ink (loss) on the books.


Is trash an environmental problem? Well, we turn 10 sq miles of natural habitat into new dumps every year, but those dumps are returned to useful habitat at the end of their life cycle, so, no net loss of habitat. (Compare this to 1500 sq miles of habitat lost to new building projects each yr. Once developed, they are rarely returned to Nature.)


Dumps are now required to be built with measures taken to prevent leakage of chemicals, so one of your objections is a non-factor. Organic material buried in a dump undergoes extremely slow degradation in those hypoxic conditions. If you're one of the "co2 is poison" bunch, that's good for sequestering carbon.


Conclusion: curbside trash has minimal environmental impact, but decreasing them may have sever impact on the human condition.

[Hemlock140]

Our Christmas lights are all LED and use very little electricity. With the amount of purchases we do from Amazon, the number of boxes is not that much more at Christmas, and that's what the recycling bin is for. Balled up wrapping paper is great for the fireplace, burns with great flame colors. I agree on the plastic "bubble" packaging it's wasteful and also a pain to open, and should be banned.

[randomparent]

Christmas is a difficult time of year to be green, that's certain. To minimize the damage and the chaos, we've had a three gift rule since our children were very young, and as they have gotten older we've tried to integrate more experience gifts into the mix. We've been using the same pretty boxes and cloth bags, tied with real ribbons to wrap gifts year after year.

I feel a twinge of guilt when hauling our tree to be mulched, and the needles (and nasal congestion from allergies) are a pain, but I'd feel much worse using a big plastic tree. My in-laws just bought a new one this year, and all I could think about was the old one heading for the landfill. Can a faux tree even be recycled?

The thing that makes me feel worst about our carbon footprint isn't the materials gifts. It's flying the five of us to visit family in another part of the country. That dwarves any small amount of cardboard and plastic shrink-wrap that may find its way to our curb after the holidays, but my elderly parents won't live forever and this season is a time for family.

[steiconi]

Cardboard boxes are great, how can anyone bear to throw them away?

My cats love Amazon deliveries and claim the box as soon as the delivery guy leaves.

Once the box is so shredded that it loses feline interest, it gets used in the garden as sheet mulch.

Occasionally I get to a box before the cats, and use it for storage, or taking donations to charity, or shipping gifts.

[kygman]

Originally Posted by Coldjensens

We throw our Christmas tree in the back yard and let it sit until late spring. the birds love it. Then we make it out first bonfire of the year. We do not even need charcoal starter to get it burning, just a little left over wrapping paper. it is all very green.

We have a deal around here, or did a couple years ago, where the state department of fish and wildlife would have a drop off point for Christmas trees. Then they tie some together, add weights, and drop them in the lakes as fish attractants

[guidoLaMoto]

If those Christmas trees hadn't been cut & used, what would have happened to them at the end of their life-cycle?