The holiday season can be stressful for lots of reasons: too much spending, too much eating, travel delays and family tensions. For the eco-conscious, another stress is also part of the mix: the stress that comes from trying to buy green gifts. We do our best: giving experiences or services, buying second hand, or giving homemade. But at some point almost all of us step foot (literally or virtually) into the marketplace of the new. And when we do we come face to face with the fact that consumer culture and sustainability are antithetical. I know it’s discomfiting, but, yes, “buying green” is a contradiction in terms.
In my experience, there are a few different ways to deal with this stress: you can repress the knowledge that consumption is unsustainable, you can try to minimize or offset the damage, you can try to assuage your guilt, or you can do some combination of all three. Around the holidays, I tend to do some combination, especially as–with each passing year–I am confronted with ever more brand-conscious wishlists from my kids.
Consider if you will my son’s Hanukkah wishlist this year. Is there anything on this list that I can give without shopping? Anything that I can buy secondhand or make myself? Unfortunately, no. But also consider what’s not on his list: the kindle, the iphone, the Xbox. These are all things he has asked for but has been told he isn’t getting (at least for now). See, here I am, employing one of the strategies of the eco-conscious shopper: assuaging my guilt! I’ve also relied a lot on the repression method, in which I simply take off my green hat and hand over my credit card.
And what about minimizing or offsetting the damage? Well, this year I decided to tie gift purchases, as much as possible, to sales and donations of unused or underused stuff. So, for example, in order to put the FIFA 12 wii game on his wishlist, my son had to clean out his existing video game collection. The result? A $64 credit at Gamestop, which was more than enough to cover the cost of his new video game. The Judy Moody books on my daughter’s gift list? The shelf space and money for those will come from the Rainbow Fairy books she has outgrown.
Recommerce–a fancy name for trading-in–has long been a staple of the car market but has recently caught on much more broadly. Perhaps the hottest recommerce market right now is electronics, in which companies like Boston-based Gazelle are offering consumers, who are ever-voracious for the fastest, hippest, and most-tricked out gadget, the opportunity to resell their “old” devices. Gazelle also commits to responsible recycle any devices it cannot resell.
There are, of course, lots of reasons to resell our unused stuff (not least of which is the money). The question for me is: is environmental responsibility one of these reasons? In other words, if I resell some of my old stuff before I buy new stuff, am I undoing some of the environmental damage caused by my consumption?
Without question, it’s better for the environment from an end-of-life perspective when we resell our goods rather than trash them. To the extent that recommerce helps keep goods out of the landfill or the incinerator, it’s an environmental plus. But what about at the other end of the lifecycle? Does recommerce minimize the environmental impacts associated with harvesting natural resources, and manufacturing and distributing the goods we make from them? I think that the unfortunate answer to these questions is no. And even more unfortunately, I suspect that recommerce actually reinforces our consumption of new products, and in so doing may in fact undermine its waste-reduction benefits. For no matter how much waste recommerce may reduce, its financial success depends on our continual consumption of the new. Otherwise there would be nothing to resell.
Which isn’t to say that I won’t keep reselling my stuff. But it is to say that when I buy new–whether I resell something old first or not–I’ll have to lean heavily on another of my eco-conscious shopping strategies: repression.
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Nothing is more visibly anti-green about the holiday season than waste. And, boy, do we generate a lot of waste. Just to give you some idea of how much, consider that:
- From Thanksgiving to New Years Day, household waste increases by more than 25%, or about 1 million extra tons each week.
The 2.65 billion Christmas cards sold in the US each year could fill a football field 10 stories high.
- 38,000 miles of ribbon are thrown out each year, enough to tie a bow around the Earth and then some?
Reviewing these holiday trash facts is a not a very joyous way to start the holiday season, I know. But, believe it or not, it can lead to joy, if the facts motivate you to do things differently. After all, the point of the holidays isn’t to create waste (or go into debt, or gain weight, or whatever it is that depresses you about the holidays…).
So ask yourself: what is the point? What do the holidays mean to you? For me the point is to be with family and friends, to express our appreciation for those we love, and to give thanks for all the good things we have. Whatever the meaning of the holidays is for you, it is possible to align your celebrations and gift giving with your values, including your commitment to green living.
In my view, reducing waste is one of the easiest steps on this path. In most cases, it costs nothing, or saves money–not to mention its efficacy in assuaging a guilty conscience!
Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Reuse gift wrap, gift bags & gift boxes.
- Make your own gift wrap or gift bags.
- Bring your own bags when you shop & politely decline tissue paper wrapping for your purchases.
- Give gifts that aren’t stuff (and don’t need to be wrapped!): memberships, outings, donations in the recipient’s honor, plants/trees/shrubs.
- Give fewer gifts: instead of giving gifts for everyone in your family, do a secret santa. Or instead of giving gifts at all, write poems or tributes or songs for your friends & family; or just share a festive meal.
- Consider sending party invitations and holiday cards electronically.
- Use washable dishes for parties and gatherings.
- Recycle everything you can, including gift wrap (if your recycling center takes it) and plastic bags (many grocery stores accept plastic bags for recycling).
- Compost your Christmas tree.
- Make your lighting display smaller, turn off the lights when you go to bed, and when it’s time to replace your lights, get LEDs.
For more ideas on going green this holiday season, check out our other green holidays tips.
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If buying less stuff is the first principle of sustainable consumption, then “mindful” buying is the second. We can start by buying less. But the next step is to buy better. When you shop this holiday season consider: Where did the item come from? How was it made? Who made it? How long will it last? Can it be reused or recycled when the recipient no longer needs it? Who benefits from the sale? To what extent and in what ways can it enhance the recipient’s life?
The unfortunate truth is that it is hard to practice mindful shopping when you buy from national or multinational chains, whether online or bricks-and-mortar. But you can frequently practice it at your locally and independently owned toy store or clothing store or jeweler. You can sometimes practice it online, when you seek out socially and environmentally conscious retailers. And you can also practice it by frequenting second-hand and vintage shops.
Large chains, bargain shopping and convenience shopping are here to stay, for better and for worse. They are part of the landscape. They may serve as the most direct and accessible routes to consumption. But we can sometimes take the windy, back roads instead. It may take longer, it may cost more upfront, but we may also find that it gives us more satisfaction and value in the end.
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So you’ve decided to take a first step towards greening your holidays: you’re going to buy less stuff. So what do you give instead of “stuff”? Here’s a list of ideas to get you started
- Give tickets to theater, music, a sporting event; or dinner out
- Give a personal service such as a massage or facial
- Give a class in knitting, wood-working, dance, or cooking
- Give membership to a museum, gym or yoga studio.
- Give to a charity in honor of the recipient.
- Give an experience that you and the recipient can enjoy together.
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There are lots of things we can do to “green” our holidays: from using LED holiday lights to reusing and recycling gift wrap. But these little things won’t add up to much if we ignore the bigger challenge: our buying habits. Our penchant for shopping has a profound impact on the environment (to learn the ways in and extent to which consumerism harms the earth, click here and here). And at no time do we buy more than between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.
If you want to green your holidays, start by asking yourself: “What can I give my loved ones other than more stuff?” We don’t really need all that “new stuff” anyway. It may be less convenient and take more time to give each other non-stuff but it may also provide more and longer-lasting satisfaction (this has actually been studied; click here for a link to a 2002 article published in The Journal of Happiness Studies). In other words, buying fewer expendable consumer goods isn’t just good for the planet. It may make us happier.
(to see more green holiday tips click here)
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I really enjoyed reading your article Rachel. I also like that you seem to teach your children the importance of saving the environment and leading an eco-friendly life. And what you mentioned about sustainability and consumerism being antithetical is absolutely true. However, I think before going back to being hunters and gatherers, we need to support innovations. Have you heard about ecovillages? In these villages, people grow their own organic food, they use renewable energy resources and they use eco-friendly architecture (like green roofs). I loved hearing about these types of villages and I hope we will hear more about them in the future!
Comment by Jennifer Tehraud — March 19, 2012 @ 1:35 pm
Thank you for your kind words, Jennifer, and for informing me about eco-villages.
I hope my post didn’t give the impression that I would like to see us return to hunter/gatherer society. I don’t and think that such desires are ludicrous!
Past ways of life are gone and can’t be recreated in their original form. We can, however, learn from the past just as we can from other contemporaneous cultures and societies. And we can adopt and adapt whatever seems useful to us now.
In many ways, it sounds like the eco-village concept adapts elements of pre-modern social organization to the contemporary context. The eco-village teaches us that the small scale, self-sufficiency and intentionality of pre-modern society can still serve us today, and that it would be in our self-interest to recreate a more communal and place-based way of life.
Comment by Rachel White — March 19, 2012 @ 7:26 pm