Precycling for the Holidays

This article was originally published by Jim Lynch from TechSoup.  We loved the post and thought we would share.

I admit that this holiday angle is a bit of a challenge. The holidays are the time for letting go, for hilarity, parties, gift giving, decorating, feasting, and spending lots of money. In America, this produces 25% more garbage than at any other time of the year. We buy and send cards and gifts, use tons of wrapping paper, ribbons, and packing materials, mail stuff all over the world in a massive supply chain, which eventually ends up in landfills.

Fortunately, Green Technology Magazine has helped me out with their compiled selection of the latest green holiday tips. I did my own list called Greening Your Holidays back when GreenTech was young. If I were to add to my original list I’d recommend giving digital books or subscriptions to people with iPads or digital readers like Kindles, NOOK, Sony Reader, and others; joining catalog choice to reduce the amount of unwanted holiday junk mail, and just generally buying things that are reparable and have minimum packaging.

Here’s the New Crop of Precycling Holiday Tips:

• About.com’s 5 Tips for Green Christmas Decorations talks about things like decorating a potted plant rather than a cut or artificial Christmas tree. So if your office decorates, consider a potted live tree. It’ll add health benefits to the office air throughout the year as well.
• The Ecologist’s Christmas Presents and Decorations ‘ Without Shopping is mostly about giving gifts of baked goods. If I did that, I probably wouldn’t have friends any more. But, this can be a good way to give gifts to your office mates without the waste.
• TechCrunch offers their Green Gadget Shopping Guide to help you pick the most useful (and least wasteful) in tech products for this holiday season.
• Environmental News Network’s Merry Green Christmas focuses just on energy consumption by Christmas lights. Curiously nobody is mentioning solar Christmas lights yet.
• Eartheasy.com’s How to Have a Green Christmas is about buying less and doing things like “re-gifting” (to pass on gifts you received but don’t want). Full disclosure: one of the funnest things we do at TechSoup is our White Elephant Holiday Party in which we re-gift truly atrocious things to each other. It keeps useless stuff out the landfill at least for a while, a crude form of precycling.
• Getgreenliving.com’s Have Yourself a Greener Little Christmas advocates for online shopping where goods are often shipped straight from the factory, which cuts down on the overall freight impact.
• The Guardian’s Has the Roast of Christmas Passed? tells us why British people shouldn’t have the time-honored Christmas pudding.
• Justmeans.com’s Have Yourself a Merry Green Christmas! advocates for stopping gift-giving altogether. I’d say that’s the closest anyone comes to pure precycling.
• Sierra Club’s Green Holiday Tips is an activist’s list that suggests that we have a rousing environmental debate at the Christmas feast. That’s also very good precycling practice except for breakage occurring from thrown objects.
• University of Virginia’s Dreaming of a Green Christmas? Holidays Can Be Sustainable suggests we give each other woolens and turn down the heat. I like the eco-austerity of that suggestion.
• For some good cynical holiday cheer, check out Brian Sommer’s ZDnet rant – Santa ‘ Bring these tech gifts to these people NOW.