Making this Christmas the ‘greenest’ yet

While it’s the most wonderful time of the year, you may not realize that it can also be the most wasteful. With Christmas right around the corner, there are many ways that we can be greener this Christmas.

Many locals around the area are leading the way toward making this Christmas their ‘greenest’ yet.

Like it or not, it’s a fact of Christmas. Extra trash, more than 5 million tons nationally of which 4 million is wrapping paper waste.

“My family and I were around the Christmas tree unwrapping and had produced five bags of trash and it was more trash than we had produced in a month.” said Stephanie Lancaster.

Stephanie took action and now runs a business selling reusable ‘fabric wrappers.’

“We decided to design a fabric wrapper that would wrap boxes; it’s reverse-able and one-piece. We also have fabric gift bags, and those products are re-useable, so they can be used over and over, year after year.”

“Now outside of fabric wrappers, there’s an older more time tested technique developed by the Japanese over four-hundred years ago. It’s called Furoshiki, and what they do is they take a piece of fabric and continue to tie knots over the top and by the time you’re done you have a nicely wrapped gift with a fabric that you can use again and again.”

Stephanie has been running this business for nearly 2 years and is seeing interest grow all the time. If Americans would use re-usable gift-wrap for just three gifts this year we would save enough paper to cover 45,000 football fields.

On the other side of the county, Airlie Gardens is taking steps to reduce the impact of their enchanted Airlie display by using LED lights.

Matt Collogan, environmental educator at Airlie Gardens said “By switching over, you can reduce your energy cost by 80 percent in some cases, so a lot of savings there. The LED lights are brighter, they last longer, and they emit very little heat, a lot less than the incandescents.”