Holiday Waste-Precycling

I received our waste management newsletter the other day and was reading through it this morning. Here are some statistics they listed. These are for the city of Lexington. It produces 25% more wasted between Thanksgiving and New Year's. In Lexington, if we recycled 30% of the material sent to the landfill in that period, we could recover 10,000 TONS, save $240,000 in landfill fees and earn $1 million in revenue from the sale of recyclables. This is just for the city of Lexington, imagine if we did this all over the USA and the world. Holiday waste can not only be recycled but precycled. Here are some ideas for precycling. I will talk about recycling in another post.

1) Use or make cloth gift bags for gifts. I have found them several places this year and my daughter's birthday present sent from Amazon.com by her aunt came in a large cloth gift bag.
2) Save gift bags and reuse. You can also reuse tissue paper. Just simply flatten out and fold it to be used later.
3) Wrap kid's gifts in comics from newspaper.
4) Use kitchen or bath towels as gift wrap.
5) Send e-cards versus mailed Christmas cards.
6) Cancel all those catalogs that come this time of year and you don't want anyway. Call the company directly and asked to be removed from their mailing list or sign-up for one of the many stop junk mail services on the internet.
7) Give rechargeable batteries along with that electronic toy or gift.
8) Don't use gift boxes to wrap unless absolutely necessary. Save boxes and reuse them.
9) Invest in LED lights for your Christmas lighting.
10) Buy paper and gift bags that can be recycled. Most traditional gift wrap cannot be recycled.

Be creative. There are many ways to wrap gifts besides the traditional Christmas wrap and ribbons that are still pretty.