Poor Planet Earth

Christmas sure is hard on the environment. Think about it. We slice down trees and put them in our houses for a few weeks. Then decorate them with lights. So right there you are using up all this extra electricity plus killing a tree for fun. What happens to that tree later? Burned? Chipped and reused as mulch? What about all that goes into growing that perfect tree? Chipping up that perfect tree?

What about outdoor Christmas lights for your home? We put ours out that were handed down to us, but you know what? I can’t bring myself to plug them in for more than an hour or two each year. I just can’t do it. And I am not even an extreme environmentalist. I just can’t see the point of wasting that electricity and money.

And Christmas cards? I like getting them. I reuse them as gift tags the next year. But still, the creation of them, the shipping of them, the energy used to recycle them. My hubby mentioned something I hadn’t thought of which was all the extra weight for shipping the cards around by the mail service. The extra gas? The extra truckloads of them? How about the extra idling time by the mailperson as they drop off all those cards in everyone’s mailboxes? He didn’t think of that one, but I wonder if it makes a difference.

This morning as I was unpackaging the multitude of toys that my daughter received, I realised, not for the first time, how much toys are over-packaged these days. Particularly are Fischer Price Little People. Those little things are taped in, elasticed in and twist tied in. Sometimes they are even screwed in. It took me forever to get her Barbie clothes out of their package. Then to sort and take apart the packaging for the recyclable parts and the non-recyclable parts. And the gift wrap, and the bows and the tags… Christmas is just not friendly to the environment.

What is scarier, is going around town (we live in a fairly educated town) and seeing all the recyclable things in the overflowing garbage bins after Christmas. It is disappointing and disgusting.

It’s tough. What do you do? Personally, I would like to start a door-to-door recycle program in our town. There are bins, but people are lazy. They don’t want to collect, sort and then take it all across town to dump it. Part of the problem is that some neighbourhoods have dumpsters, so how would you encourage the people with dumpsters that they should recycle? If they are restricted in the amount they are permitted to toss out, they may be forced to recycle. But they are not restricted. So then what? Peer pressure?

I don’t know the whole answer. But I can’t be alone.

Merry Christmas Earth, here’s some more crap to tuck under your skin.

Until then…