In our callout for greener gifting ideas, some readers suggested gift certificates for things like a show, a restaurant or, more traditionally, a store. Gift cards can be a great last-minute option, and they’re very popular — in fact, they were the most popular holiday gift in a recent online survey of Canadians, more than half of whom planned to buy gift cards for their loved ones. But they, too, have an environmental impact. Many gift cards are made of PVC plastic, which is hard to recycle and isn’t accepted by most recycling systems. While they’re small and slim, their popularity means they add up — in 2014, two billion gift cards were purchased in the U.S. alone, according to an estimate by the consulting firm A.T. Kearney. Giftrocket, a company that offers e-gift cards, estimates that each physical card contains about five grams of PVC and generates 21 grams of CO2. That means in total, gift cards created 10,000 tonnes of PVC waste and 42,000 tonnes of CO2 in the U.S. alone in 2014. So, what to do? Here are some options:

• Some retailers, like Starbucks and Whole Foods, offer recyclable cardboard gift cards (see above photo).
• Many others offer gift cards that can be printed onto a sheet of paper.
• E-gift cards can be sent via email and printed out or redeemed online or from your phone.
• Some small businesses just keep a note of credit that you can redeem when you get to the store.
• If you have a plastic gift card that you’ve already spent, you can often reload it and re-gift it to someone else.

If you really want to recycle gift cards after using them and have a way of collecting a big volume, they can be recycled by a company named Terracycle, which specializes in recycling materials that normally aren’t recyclable. The company charges $91 to recycle a “small” box (25 x 25 x 46 centimetres) full of plastic cards. Some Canadian municipalities — for example, Strathcona in Alberta and Niagara Region in Ontario — allow people to drop off spent gift cards at certain depots for recycling. (The Municipality of Strathcona uses Terracycle as its gift card recycler.) Whatever you choose to do, think about what the gift card or certificate can be used to buy — the environmental impact of that purchase is probably much bigger than that of the card itself. — Emily Chung

In our callout for greener gifting ideas, some readers suggested gift certificates for things like a show, a restaurant or, more traditionally, a store. Gift cards can be a great last-minute option, and they're very popular — in fact, they were the most popular holiday gift in a recent online survey of Canadians, more than half of whom planned to buy gift cards for their loved ones. But they, too, have an environmental impact. Many gift cards are made of PVC plastic, which is hard to recycle and isn't accepted by most recycling systems. While they're small and slim, their popularity means they add up — in 2014, two billion gift cards were purchased in the U.S. alone, according to an estimate by the consulting firm A.T. Kearney. Giftrocket, a company that offers e-gift cards, estimates that each physical card contains about five grams of PVC and generates 21 grams of CO2. That means in total, gift cards created 10,000 tonnes of PVC waste and 42,000 tonnes of CO2 in the U.S. alone in 2014. So, what to do? Here are some options:

• Some retailers, like Starbucks and Whole Foods, offer recyclable cardboard gift cards (see above photo).
• Many others offer gift cards that can be printed onto a sheet of paper.
• E-gift cards can be sent via email and printed out or redeemed online or from your phone.
• Some small businesses just keep a note of credit that you can redeem when you get to the store.
• If you have a plastic gift card that you've already spent, you can often reload it and re-gift it to someone else.

If you really want to recycle gift cards after using them and have a way of collecting a big volume, they can be recycled by a company named Terracycle, which specializes in recycling materials that normally aren't recyclable. The company charges $91 to recycle a "small" box (25 x 25 x 46 centimetres) full of plastic cards. Some Canadian municipalities — for example, Strathcona in Alberta and Niagara Region in Ontario — allow people to drop off spent gift cards at certain depots for recycling. (The Municipality of Strathcona uses Terracycle as its gift card recycler.) Whatever you choose to do, think about what the gift card or certificate can be used to buy — the environmental impact of that purchase is probably much bigger than that of the card itself. — Emily Chung

In our callout for greener gifting ideas, some readers suggested gift certificates for things like a show, a restaurant or, more traditionally, a store. Gift cards can be a great last-minute option, and they're very popular — in fact, they were the most popular holiday gift in a recent online survey of Canadians, more than half of whom planned to buy gift cards for their loved ones. But they, too, have an environmental impact. Many gift cards are made of PVC plastic, which is hard to recycle and isn't accepted by most recycling systems. While they're small and slim, their popularity means they add up — in 2014, two billion gift cards were purchased in the U.S. alone, according to an estimate by the consulting firm A.T. Kearney. Giftrocket, a company that offers e-gift cards, estimates that each physical card contains about five grams of PVC and generates 21 grams of CO2. That means in total, gift cards created 10,000 tonnes of PVC waste and 42,000 tonnes of CO2 in the U.S. alone in 2014. So, what to do? Here are some options: If you really want to recycle gift cards after using them and have a way of collecting a big volume, they can be recycled by a company named Terracycle, which specializes in recycling materials that normally aren't recyclable. The company charges $91 to recycle a "small" box (25 x 25 x 46 centimetres) full of plastic cards. Some Canadian municipalities — for example, Strathcona in Alberta and Niagara Region in Ontario — allow people to drop off spent gift cards at certain depots for recycling. (The Municipality of Strathcona uses Terracycle as its gift card recycler.) Whatever you choose to do, think about what the gift card or certificate can be used to buy — the environmental impact of that purchase is probably much bigger than that of the card itself. — Emily Chung

In our callout for greener gifting ideas, some readers suggested gift certificates for things like a show, a restaurant or, more traditionally, a store. Gift cards can be a great last-minute option, and they're very popular — in fact, they were the most popular holiday gift in a recent online survey of Canadians, more than half of whom planned to buy gift cards for their loved ones. But they, too, have an environmental impact. Many gift cards are made of PVC plastic, which is hard to recycle and isn't accepted by most recycling systems. While they're small and slim, their popularity means they add up — in 2014, two billion gift cards were purchased in the U.S. alone, according to an estimate by the consulting firm A.T. Kearney. Giftrocket, a company that offers e-gift cards, estimates that each physical card contains about five grams of PVC and generates 21 grams of CO2. That means in total, gift cards created 10,000 tonnes of PVC waste and 42,000 tonnes of CO2 in the U.S. alone in 2014. So, what to do? Here are some options: If you really want to recycle gift cards after using them and have a way of collecting a big volume, they can be recycled by a company named Terracycle, which specializes in recycling materials that normally aren't recyclable. The company charges $91 to recycle a "small" box (25 x 25 x 46 centimetres) full of plastic cards. Some Canadian municipalities — for example, Strathcona in Alberta and Niagara Region in Ontario — allow people to drop off spent gift cards at certain depots for recycling. (The Municipality of Strathcona uses Terracycle as its gift card recycler.) Whatever you choose to do, think about what the gift card or certificate can be used to buy — the environmental impact of that purchase is probably much bigger than that of the card itself. — Emily Chung

In our callout for greener gifting ideas, some readers suggested gift certificates for things like a show, a restaurant or, more traditionally, a store. Gift cards can be a great last-minute option, and they're very popular — in fact, they were the most popular holiday gift in a recent online survey of Canadians, more than half of whom planned to buy gift cards for their loved ones. But they, too, have an environmental impact. Many gift cards are made of PVC plastic, which is hard to recycle and isn't accepted by most recycling systems. While they're small and slim, their popularity means they add up — in 2014, two billion gift cards were purchased in the U.S. alone, according to an estimate by the consulting firm A.T. Kearney. Giftrocket, a company that offers e-gift cards, estimates that each physical card contains about five grams of PVC and generates 21 grams of CO2. That means in total, gift cards created 10,000 tonnes of PVC waste and 42,000 tonnes of CO2 in the U.S. alone in 2014. So, what to do? Here are some options:

• Some retailers, like Starbucks and Whole Foods, offer recyclable cardboard gift cards (see above photo).
• Many others offer gift cards that can be printed onto a sheet of paper.
• E-gift cards can be sent via email and printed out or redeemed online or from your phone.
• Some small businesses just keep a note of credit that you can redeem when you get to the store.
• If you have a plastic gift card that you've already spent, you can often reload it and re-gift it to someone else.

If you really want to recycle gift cards after using them and have a way of collecting a big volume, they can be recycled by a company named Terracycle, which specializes in recycling materials that normally aren't recyclable. The company charges $91 to recycle a "small" box (25 x 25 x 46 centimetres) full of plastic cards. Some Canadian municipalities — for example, Strathcona in Alberta and Niagara Region in Ontario — allow people to drop off spent gift cards at certain depots for recycling. (The Municipality of Strathcona uses Terracycle as its gift card recycler.) Whatever you choose to do, think about what the gift card or certificate can be used to buy — the environmental impact of that purchase is probably much bigger than that of the card itself. — Emily Chung

The polar ice caps are melting before our eyes. Artificial snow will not be de rigueur this year.   Even as whales starve because of the plastic they have consumed, and landfills swell beyond all reason, one age-old holiday tradition that has been hard to shake is the habit of excess.   Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, Americans produce a colossal amount of waste, throwing out, by some estimates, 25 percent more stuff than they usually do, over one million extra tons of garbage each week. Food waste is a contributor, and so is traditional wrapping paper, the kind pocked with glitter or coated with plastic for that festive sheen, and therefore unfit for recycling.   According to the National Environmental Education Foundation, each year, on average, we discard 38,000 miles of ribbon, $11 billion worth of packing material and 15 million live Christmas trees.   Glitter, tinsel and shiny wrapping paper are now signs of the apocalypse, judging by the #zerowasteholidays and similar hashtags that are blooming on Instagram. These reveal a new world made from orange-peel garlands and ornaments fashioned from dried apples and dehydrated citrus slices. Indeed, desiccated fruit would seem to be a badge of responsible style.       Wrapping paper is penitential: a slurry of brown, linen and hemp (brown craft paper, supermarket bags, scraps of fabric or newspaper) and embellished with cinnamon sticks, eucalyptus leaves and other twiggy items.   There is a lot of twine.         “There will be moral judgments on what’s under the tree this year for sure,” said Marian Salzman, a trend spotter, author and early public-relations promoter of Giving Tuesday, which retailers have sometimes turned into a shopping boondoggle that conflates consumption with charitable donations. “If I see shiny green, red and silver paper, I am going to think, These are not good environmentalists. These people don’t realize the world is on fire.”   Sustainable holiday décor has been a best-practices policy of environmentalists for decades. But now that the signs of climate change are blazingly, meltingly evident, those quaint Earth Day era tenets — reuse, reduce, recycle — seem compulsory; the least one can do.   When Abbye Churchill’s rescue dogs shredded her sheets a few weeks ago, she saw a decorating opportunity. Ms. Churchill, 35, is a textile artist and author leery of waste and always on the lookout for fabric she can salvage and repurpose, and so she tore the soft pink sheets into strips and began stitching them into a garland that now embraces her holiday tree.   Textile refuse is her particular bugbear, and for years it has been her mission to harvest, scrounge and locate discarded fabric and clothing, along with dead stock from fashion companies, and rework these orphan scraps into beautiful new pieces.    

The Enviro-Elves

Ms. Churchill is one in a cohort of makers, amateurs and professionals, dedicated to a sustainable holiday this year: a redemptive, perhaps pre-emptive, precursor to sober January.   Think comestible and compostable, as Antonia Pitica does, when you trim your tree and adorn your table. Ms. Pitica, 28, is an owner of Eco Roots, a company in Aspen, Colo., that sells objects like bamboo toothbrushes and rose gold razor handles, and she is an enthusiastic promoter of dried citrus as a decorative garnish.   Tiffany Threadgould is a designer in residence at TerraCycle, a company that collects single-use items, including toothbrushes and juice pouches, and teams up with companies to convert the material into usable objects.   She can show you how to make a snowflake ornament from an Entenmann’s Little Bites Muffins box, a strand of holiday lights using toothpaste tubes and gift bows from food wrappers. But she is less bullish on her mission, as the realities of the global waste market grow more dire.   “Upcycling is a stopgap method for things that exist, but we really need to be thinking about ways to stop garbage before it becomes garbage, to embrace the reduce and reuse part of the three Rs,” Ms. Threadgould said. “As for holiday decorating, I still typically do it with the mind-set of upcycling, but I look to materials that have more value. Maybe it’s less single-use plastic and more things that have a chip in them.”   She has lately made a candelabra from battered teacups, and salvaged cookie cutters during a clean-out of her mother’s home of 30 years to use as napkin rings.   “I have taken stripy sweaters and turned them into Christmas stockings,” she said, “and I’m still making light fixtures from soda bottles and old surveyor’s tripods, but I’m in a purge state right now, and going forward I don’t think I want to make too much more stuff.”   How do you understand zero waste? Nora Abousteit, whose company, CraftJam, offers workshops in all manner of crafts, including wreath making, calligraphy and wooden ornaments said, “for me it’s not plastic and something I can reuse. Or I’ve already used.”   The Amazon box, this year’s scourge, is good for “snowy city landscapes” — cut them out and paint everything white, Ms. Abousteit said — or slice up old Kleenex boxes, as she does.   Use a darning needle and colored yarn to stitch craft paper together and elevate your wrapping game. Slice toilet paper rolls into discs and pinch and glue them into star shapes. Walnut shells can be packaging for tiny gifts, like a Borrower’s cunning innovation.   “The thing about holiday décor is that anything can be material,” said Ms. Churchill, the textile designer. “I’m a big fan of grocery store fliers and newspaper.”   She also felts old sweaters, using a small-scale needle felter, to make ornaments. “You just stab the needle into the sweater and it starts to mat and then you can cut it into shapes,” she said. “You could do it watching TV and get out a lot of aggression.”   Ms. Churchill usually buys houseplants to use as Christmas trees, though she said she has reached maximum capacity in her Brooklyn apartment and this year may employ her rubber plant. “It’s gotten pretty big,” she said. “It might just be its time.”   Most cities collect Christmas trees and chip them into mulch; and the trees themselves are a renewable crop. Yet their production involves resources like water and sometimes chemical additives like pesticides, along with fuel to harvest and deliver them. It’s complicated.   An unlikely solution to the Christmas tree problem is to procure an Evergleam, the hipster-kitschy aluminum tree and midcentury artifact now celebrating its 60th birthday. Early selling points were removable limbs that slid into a sleeve and a telescoping trunk, the whole contracting into an easily stored box.   Such innovation preserved the trees so well that it prefigured their revival. You can find hundreds, perhaps thousands, on eBay, in a range of prices and in seemingly perfect condition.   The Aluminum Specialty Company in Manitowoc, Wis., made between three million and five million trees before ceasing production in about 1971, said Joe Kapler, the lead curator at the Wisconsin Historical Society, which shows off its collection of Evergleams in an exhibition each holiday season.   “It’s amazing how they’ve made a comeback,” Mr. Kapler said, adding that his show is now in its 10th year, and ever more popular for its immersive, Instagrammable settings — a complete replica of a midcentury living room visitors are encouraged to use as a selfie backdrop.   But don’t call the Evergleam an artificial tree, Mr. Kapler said mock-sternly, dismissing the plastic pine facsimiles that began to appear in the late ’60s. “It’s an aluminum tree,” its very own genus.    

Go-Go Goes Eco

Those who throw parties on a grand scale have been educating themselves in sustainability for decades.   Materials for the Arts, for example, a program run by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs that accepts fabric, furniture, paper products, art supplies and more and donates those materials to nonprofits and schools, is now 40 years old and long a beneficiary of the city’s post-gala surplus. You too can think creatively about the afterlife of your own at-home props.   David Stark, a brand experience designer in New York whose clients include Target, “Saturday Night Live” and Uniqlo, is particularly skilled in low- or zero-waste productions. “If you’re going to throw stuff away, or not store it to repurpose for another event,” he said, “what would it be like if the stuff told a story and then had a life after you used it?”   For a recent party given by the skin care brand Kiehl’s, Mr. Stark’s team built a juice bar from enormous cardboard mailing tubes and misfit fruit, the bruised and imperfect fruits that are discarded by growers as unfit for supermarket produce.   Afterward, they gave the tubes to the Bronx Zoo so the tigers could use them as toys. Yes, they became tiger toys, and yes, there are photos. (You’re welcome.)       “We’ve been trying to save the planet since Greta was in kindergarten,” said James LaForce, a public relations executive, referring to Greta Thunberg, this year’s Time magazine star.   He and his husband, Stephen Henderson’s annual holiday party, with a guest count that hovers around 800, is a good place to search for sustainable decorating tips.   They have been hosting it for 20 years and are scrupulous about their waste habits. They cater it themselves, with Mr. Henderson doing all the cooking, and they pride themselves on producing as little food waste as possible.   “We always bring several boxes of Ziploc bags to the party, in case there are leftovers and we send everyone home with goody bags,” Mr. LaForce said, adding that all the food is bite-size hors d’oeuvres or cookies. (Things that are half-eaten, and scraps from Mr. Henderson’s cooking are collected and driven in their Tesla to a compost pile near their house upstate.) “Yes, we are using brand-new Ziploc bags for this. However, at home, we wash them out in the dishwasher and reuse them until they have holes.   “Similarly, we reuse and repurpose a lot of the costume elements from our annual tableaux vivant,” Mr. LaForce said. “We’ve used the same Santa costume every year for the past decade, and at this year’s party, which will be at Judson Memorial Church and is a memorial service for Santa, we’ll use the costume again, even though Santa will be in a coffin. We keep all our serving pieces, décor elements and costumes carefully stored and labeled: ‘doctors’ uniforms,’ ‘sailor,’ ‘barnyard animals’ in our basement upstate.”   But the real décor at this holiday party will be the go-go dancers, bedazzled with black Speedos and body paint in the form of black and white candy canes. “We always have go-go dancers,” Mr. LaForce said. “Doesn’t everyone? So, each year, I diligently collect the Speedos from the dancers at the end of the night so they can be used again the next year.”   Pressed on this point, he admitted: “There has been Speedo loss.”   Beyond a profligacy with men’s bathing suits or a stubborn fondness for sparkly paper, the wasteful behavior that is a true mark of this holiday season — and a more reliable engine of our doom — is the proliferation of Amazon boxes piling up on doorsteps and in apartment lobbies.   As Ms. Salzman, the brand expert, said, “This is the last year where gifting is even going to be appropriate.”   She was not talking about reviving the pious holiday practice of the last decade of buying a baby goat in your daughter’s name for a weaving collective in a third-world country and proclaiming that transaction on a holiday card that obviates the need to stuff her stocking with a pair of Madewell jeans.   “We are talking about less is more,” Ms. Salzman said. “And less can be nothing.”   Penelope Green is a feature writer in the Style department. She has been a reporter for the Home section, editor of Styles of The Times, an early iteration of Style, and a story editor at The New York Times Magazine. She lives in Manhattan.  

Cannabis may be known as the 'green industry,' but its reputation is not an exceptionally eco-friendly one.   JESSICA MCKEIL   The industry has a bad rap for its inability to rein in excessive energy consumption, water needs, and waste issues all along the production cycle.   When legal cannabis rolls out in a state or a country, legislators are first and foremost concerned about public health and safety, not environmental impact. The regulatory process focuses almost entirely on protecting the public, not the environment. But as the market matures, the problematic production methods of the industry become all too apparent.   Today, consumers are driving the move towards organic farming practices and the reduction of wasteful packaging. The industry itself is also moving towards better energy and water consumption, driven mainly by the need for more cost-effective cultivation methods. Although the transition is a slow one, there are many companies in the industry pushing a green agenda and building impressive environmental initiatives in cannabis. Their stories are worth highlighting.  

ENERGY REDUCTION IN CANNABIS CULTIVATION

  Both indoor and greenhouse-grown cannabis are notorious for their excessive energy consumption. Cannabis is a plant with particular environmental requirements, which translate into expensive lighting, temperature, and humidity controls. According to estimates by Oregon-based Southwest Energy Efficiency Program, indoor operations use ten times more energy per square foot than a typical office building. Energy costs for growers can make up over 50 percent of the operating budget.   As the price per pound bottoms out in places like California and Oregon, cultivators are desperate to cut costs to improve the bottom line. In many cases, this means moving away from HPS lighting towards more energy-efficient and cost-effective LED options. Other, more forward-thinking growers are taking energy efficiency one step further, like the case of Bonsai Cultivation in Colorado.   Bonsai has swapped out conventional air conditioning for recirculating water chillers, which has led to a 30 percent drop in energy consumption. The company also reassessed its light-to-plant ratio and were able to reduce their monthly power bill by another 40 percent by eliminating the need for nearly 400 lights in their 28,000-square-foot grow room.  

ADDRESSING THE PROBLEM OF WATER CONSUMPTION

  Cannabis is a thirsty species. It's an industry that tends to drain local water resources during both the cultivation and extraction phases of production. California growers may be the most noteworthy in this regard, but they are far from the only cultivators putting a significant strain on water tables. Water is an ongoing dilemma for the industry. There are already a few noteworthy companies addressing the issue of water consumption in cannabis.   Green Relief is one example. Cannabis Tech has previously covered them in more detail, but their innovative approach to water conservation is worth revisiting. Green Relief is a fully aquaponic facility located in Ontario, Canada, which recycles water within a closed-loop system. The system design is so efficient, they have reused the same water for over two years. The company has almost entirely eliminated the issue of wastewater, thanks to their aquaponics farming practices.   Another company, ecofarm, announced in a press release in December 2019 their intention to operate a Tier 11 Marijuana Cultivation and Product Manufacturing facility in Massachusetts. Applying industry best practices and smart technologies, the facility will "chart a course toward a new standard of cannabis production, focusing on product quality while committing to limit its impact on the environment." Their plans include a large-scale water recapture system, which will contribute to a predicted 70 percent energy efficiency over comparable cultivation facilities.  

WASTE REDUCTION ACROSS THE INDUSTRY

  Waste is an area where all levels of the cannabis industry need to improve. From seed to sale, the industry is rife with unrecycled plastics, uncomposted soils, and plant materials headed into the landfill. Cannabis waste, in most jurisdictions, can be just as regulated as the salable cannabis product. Such high regulatory requirements make innovation more challenging.   At the retailer level, the problem of single-use plastics and multi-material packaging has created a massive garbage problem. Especially in Canada, which has rolled out strict controls around the composition of cannabis packaging (aroma proof, waterproof, and childproof, among others), the packaging issue is an annoyance for customers and producers alike.   In Canada, Terracycle has launched a cannabis packaging recycling program, seeking to stave off the stream of waste headed from consumers to municipal landfills. Customers can sign up and begin collecting on their own, or petition their retailer to collect in store. As Terracycle explains, "This program accepts any and all cannabis packaging purchased from a licensed retailer, including outer plastic packaging, inner plastic packaging, tins, joint tubes, plastic bottles, plastic caps, and flexible plastic bags."   On the cultivation and extraction side of the industry, waste disposal doesn't get much easier. Typically, waste from cannabis cultivation and extraction is treated similarly to hazardous materials. Companies must destroy or compromise the waste beyond recognition, and sometimes send it to special handling facilities.   Micron Waste, located in Vancouver, Canada, has developed "the world's first compliant cannabis waste management system that denatures Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) in the waste streams." The Cannavore shreds, digests, and decontaminates the leftover organic waste from cultivation. The device, which is located on-site, relies on microbial digesters and water treatment processes to turn organic waste materials into potable water. Furthermore, the water is clean enough; it may be recycled back into the growing operation.  

CANNABIS CAN BECOME A SUSTAINABLE INDUSTRY IF YOU KNOW WHERE TO LOOK

  The vast majority of companies operating in the burgeoning industry only consider their bottom line when it comes to business practices. But, the growing costs of energy, water, and waste disposal have a significant impact on economic feasibility. When the price-per-pound is at an all-time low, any savings in production means a competitive edge.   Reducing power bills and implementing water recycling technologies undeniably create a competitive advantage. Moreover, consumers are increasingly choosing companies with eco-friendly, organic products with high environmental standards. As the cannabis industry matures, it will inevitably begin to reassess its wasteful ways. Soon, the bottom line and the customer base will demand it.  

The polar ice caps are melting before our eyes. Artificial snow will not be de rigueur this year.   Even as whales starve because of the plastic they have consumed, and landfills swell beyond all reason, one age-old holiday tradition that has been hard to shake is the habit of excess.   Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, Americans produce a colossal amount of waste, throwing out, by some estimates, 25 percent more stuff than they usually do, over one million extra tons of garbage each week. Food waste is a contributor, and so is traditional wrapping paper, the kind pocked with glitter or coated with plastic for that festive sheen, and therefore unfit for recycling.   According to the National Environmental Education Foundation, each year, on average, we discard 38,000 miles of ribbon, $11 billion worth of packing material and 15 million live Christmas trees.   Glitter, tinsel and shiny wrapping paper are now signs of the apocalypse, judging by the #zerowasteholidays and similar hashtags that are blooming on Instagram. These reveal a new world made from orange-peel garlands and ornaments fashioned from dried apples and dehydrated citrus slices. Indeed, desiccated fruit would seem to be a badge of responsible style.   Wrapping paper is penitential: a slurry of brown, linen and hemp (brown craft paper, supermarket bags, scraps of fabric or newspaper) and embellished with cinnamon sticks, eucalyptus leaves and other twiggy items.   There is a lot of twine.   “There will be moral judgments on what’s under the tree this year for sure,” said Marian Salzman, a trend spotter, author and early public-relations promoter of Giving Tuesday, which retailers have sometimes turned into a shopping boondoggle that conflates consumption with charitable donations. “If I see shiny green, red and silver paper, I am going to think, These are not good environmentalists. These people don’t realize the world is on fire.”   Sustainable holiday décor has been a best-practices policy of environmentalists for decades. But now that the signs of climate change are blazingly, meltingly evident, those quaint Earth Day era tenets — reuse, reduce, recycle — seem compulsory; the least one can do.   When Abbye Churchill’s rescue dogs shredded her sheets a few weeks ago, she saw a decorating opportunity. Ms. Churchill, 35, is a textile artist and author leery of waste and always on the lookout for fabric she can salvage and repurpose, and so she tore the soft pink sheets into strips and began stitching them into a garland that now embraces her holiday tree.   Textile refuse is her particular bugbear, and for years it has been her mission to harvest, scrounge and locate discarded fabric and clothing, along with dead stock from fashion companies, and rework these orphan scraps into beautiful new pieces.    

The Enviro-Elves

Ms. Churchill is one in a cohort of makers, amateurs and professionals, dedicated to a sustainable holiday this year: a redemptive, perhaps pre-emptive, precursor to sober January.   Think comestible and compostable, as Antonia Pitica does, when you trim your tree and adorn your table. Ms. Pitica, 28, is an owner of Eco Roots, a company in Aspen, Colo., that sells objects like bamboo toothbrushes and rose gold razor handles, and she is an enthusiastic promoter of dried citrus as a decorative garnish.   Tiffany Threadgould is a designer in residence at TerraCycle, a company that collects single-use items, including toothbrushes and juice pouches, and teams up with companies to convert the material into usable objects.   She can show you how to make a snowflake ornament from an Entenmann’s Little Bites Muffins box, a strand of holiday lights using toothpaste tubes and gift bows from food wrappers. But she is less bullish on her mission, as the realities of the global waste market grow more dire.   “Upcycling is a stopgap method for things that exist, but we really need to be thinking about ways to stop garbage before it becomes garbage, to embrace the reduce and reuse part of the three Rs,” Ms. Threadgould said. “As for holiday decorating, I still typically do it with the mind-set of upcycling, but I look to materials that have more value. Maybe it’s less single-use plastic and more things that have a chip in them.”   She has lately made a candelabra from battered teacups, and salvaged cookie cutters during a clean-out of her mother’s home of 30 years to use as napkin rings.   “I have taken stripy sweaters and turned them into Christmas stockings,” she said, “and I’m still making light fixtures from soda bottles and old surveyor’s tripods, but I’m in a purge state right now, and going forward I don’t think I want to make too much more stuff.”   How do you understand zero waste? Nora Abousteit, whose company, CraftJam, offers workshops in all manner of crafts, including wreath making, calligraphy and wooden ornaments said, “for me it’s not plastic and something I can reuse. Or I’ve already used.”   The Amazon box, this year’s scourge, is good for “snowy city landscapes” — cut them out and paint everything white, Ms. Abousteit said — or slice up old Kleenex boxes, as she does.   Use a darning needle and colored yarn to stitch craft paper together and elevate your wrapping game. Slice toilet paper rolls into discs and pinch and glue them into star shapes. Walnut shells can be packaging for tiny gifts, like a Borrower’s cunning innovation.   “The thing about holiday décor is that anything can be material,” said Ms. Churchill, the textile designer. “I’m a big fan of grocery store fliers and newspaper.”   She also felts old sweaters, using a small-scale needle felter, to make ornaments. “You just stab the needle into the sweater and it starts to mat and then you can cut it into shapes,” she said. “You could do it watching TV and get out a lot of aggression.”   Ms. Churchill usually buys houseplants to use as Christmas trees, though she said she has reached maximum capacity in her Brooklyn apartment and this year may employ her rubber plant. “It’s gotten pretty big,” she said. “It might just be its time.”   Most cities collect Christmas trees and chip them into mulch; and the trees themselves are a renewable crop. Yet their production involves resources like water and sometimes chemical additives like pesticides, along with fuel to harvest and deliver them. It’s complicated.   An unlikely solution to the Christmas tree problem is to procure an Evergleam, the hipster-kitschy aluminum tree and midcentury artifact now celebrating its 60th birthday. Early selling points were removable limbs that slid into a sleeve and a telescoping trunk, the whole contracting into an easily stored box.   Such innovation preserved the trees so well that it prefigured their revival. You can find hundreds, perhaps thousands, on eBay, in a range of prices and in seemingly perfect condition.   The Aluminum Specialty Company in Manitowoc, Wis., made between three million and five million trees before ceasing production in about 1971, said Joe Kapler, the lead curator at the Wisconsin Historical Society, which shows off its collection of Evergleams in an exhibition each holiday season.   “It’s amazing how they’ve made a comeback,” Mr. Kapler said, adding that his show is now in its 10th year, and ever more popular for its immersive, Instagrammable settings — a complete replica of a midcentury living room visitors are encouraged to use as a selfie backdrop.   But don’t call the Evergleam an artificial tree, Mr. Kapler said mock-sternly, dismissing the plastic pine facsimiles that began to appear in the late ’60s. “It’s an aluminum tree,” its very own genus.  

Go-Go Goes Eco

  Those who throw parties on a grand scale have been educating themselves in sustainability for decades.   Materials for the Arts, for example, a program run by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs that accepts fabric, furniture, paper products, art supplies and more and donates those materials to nonprofits and schools, is now 40 years old and long a beneficiary of the city’s post-gala surplus. You too can think creatively about the afterlife of your own at-home props.   David Stark, a brand experience designer in New York whose clients include Target, “Saturday Night Live” and Uniqlo, is particularly skilled in low- or zero-waste productions. “If you’re going to throw stuff away, or not store it to repurpose for another event,” he said, “what would it be like if the stuff told a story and then had a life after you used it?”   For a recent party given by the skin care brand Kiehl’s, Mr. Stark’s team built a juice bar from enormous cardboard mailing tubes and misfit fruit, the bruised and imperfect fruits that are discarded by growers as unfit for supermarket produce.   Afterward, they gave the tubes to the Bronx Zoo so the tigers could use them as toys. Yes, they became tiger toys, and yes, there are photos. (You’re welcome.)   “We’ve been trying to save the planet since Greta was in kindergarten,” said James LaForce, a public relations executive, referring to Greta Thunberg, this year’s Time magazine star.   He and his husband, Stephen Henderson’s annual holiday party, with a guest count that hovers around 800, is a good place to search for sustainable decorating tips.   They have been hosting it for 20 years and are scrupulous about their waste habits. They cater it themselves, with Mr. Henderson doing all the cooking, and they pride themselves on producing as little food waste as possible.   “We always bring several boxes of Ziploc bags to the party, in case there are leftovers and we send everyone home with goody bags,” Mr. LaForce said, adding that all the food is bite-size hors d’oeuvres or cookies. (Things that are half-eaten, and scraps from Mr. Henderson’s cooking are collected and driven in their Tesla to a compost pile near their house upstate.) “Yes, we are using brand-new Ziploc bags for this. However, at home, we wash them out in the dishwasher and reuse them until they have holes.   “Similarly, we reuse and repurpose a lot of the costume elements from our annual tableaux vivant,” Mr. LaForce said. “We’ve used the same Santa costume every year for the past decade, and at this year’s party, which will be at Judson Memorial Church and is a memorial service for Santa, we’ll use the costume again, even though Santa will be in a coffin. We keep all our serving pieces, décor elements and costumes carefully stored and labeled: ‘doctors’ uniforms,’ ‘sailor,’ ‘barnyard animals’ in our basement upstate.”   But the real décor at this holiday party will be the go-go dancers, bedazzled with black Speedos and body paint in the form of black and white candy canes. “We always have go-go dancers,” Mr. LaForce said. “Doesn’t everyone? So, each year, I diligently collect the Speedos from the dancers at the end of the night so they can be used again the next year.”   Pressed on this point, he admitted: “There has been Speedo loss.”   Beyond a profligacy with men’s bathing suits or a stubborn fondness for sparkly paper, the wasteful behavior that is a true mark of this holiday season — and a more reliable engine of our doom — is the proliferation of Amazon boxes piling up on doorsteps and in apartment lobbies.   As Ms. Salzman, the brand expert, said, “This is the last year where gifting is even going to be appropriate.”   She was not talking about reviving the pious holiday practice of the last decade of buying a baby goat in your daughter’s name for a weaving collective in a third-world country and proclaiming that transaction on a holiday card that obviates the need to stuff her stocking with a pair of Madewell jeans.   “We are talking about less is more,” Ms. Salzman said. “And less can be nothing.”  

The polar ice caps are melting before our eyes. Artificial snow will not be de rigueur this year.   Even as whales starve because of the plastic they have consumed, and landfills swell beyond all reason, one age-old holiday tradition that has been hard to shake is the habit of excess.   Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, Americans produce a colossal amount of waste, throwing out, by some estimates, 25 percent more stuff than they usually do, over one million extra tons of garbage each week. Food waste is a contributor, and so is traditional wrapping paper, the kind pocked with glitter or coated with plastic for that festive sheen, and therefore unfit for recycling.   According to the National Environmental Education Foundation, each year, on average, we discard 38,000 miles of ribbon, $11 billion worth of packing material and 15 million live Christmas trees.   Glitter, tinsel and shiny wrapping paper are now signs of the apocalypse, judging by the #zerowasteholidays and similar hashtags that are blooming on Instagram. These reveal a new world made from orange-peel garlands and ornaments fashioned from dried apples and dehydrated citrus slices. Indeed, desiccated fruit would seem to be a badge of responsible style.   Wrapping paper is penitential: a slurry of brown, linen and hemp (brown craft paper, supermarket bags, scraps of fabric or newspaper) and embellished with cinnamon sticks, eucalyptus leaves and other twiggy items.   There is a lot of twine.   “There will be moral judgments on what’s under the tree this year for sure,” said Marian Salzman, a trend spotter, author and early public-relations promoter of Giving Tuesday, which retailers have sometimes turned into a shopping boondoggle that conflates consumption with charitable donations. “If I see shiny green, red and silver paper, I am going to think, These are not good environmentalists. These people don’t realize the world is on fire.”   Sustainable holiday décor has been a best-practices policy of environmentalists for decades. But now that the signs of climate change are blazingly, meltingly evident, those quaint Earth Day era tenets — reuse, reduce, recycle — seem compulsory; the least one can do.   When Abbye Churchill’s rescue dogs shredded her sheets a few weeks ago, she saw a decorating opportunity. Ms. Churchill, 35, is a textile artist and author leery of waste and always on the lookout for fabric she can salvage and repurpose, and so she tore the soft pink sheets into strips and began stitching them into a garland that now embraces her holiday tree.   Textile refuse is her particular bugbear, and for years it has been her mission to harvest, scrounge and locate discarded fabric and clothing, along with dead stock from fashion companies, and rework these orphan scraps into beautiful new pieces.    

The Enviro-Elves

Ms. Churchill is one in a cohort of makers, amateurs and professionals, dedicated to a sustainable holiday this year: a redemptive, perhaps pre-emptive, precursor to sober January.   Think comestible and compostable, as Antonia Pitica does, when you trim your tree and adorn your table. Ms. Pitica, 28, is an owner of Eco Roots, a company in Aspen, Colo., that sells objects like bamboo toothbrushes and rose gold razor handles, and she is an enthusiastic promoter of dried citrus as a decorative garnish.   Tiffany Threadgould is a designer in residence at TerraCycle, a company that collects single-use items, including toothbrushes and juice pouches, and teams up with companies to convert the material into usable objects.   She can show you how to make a snowflake ornament from an Entenmann’s Little Bites Muffins box, a strand of holiday lights using toothpaste tubes and gift bows from food wrappers. But she is less bullish on her mission, as the realities of the global waste market grow more dire.   “Upcycling is a stopgap method for things that exist, but we really need to be thinking about ways to stop garbage before it becomes garbage, to embrace the reduce and reuse part of the three Rs,” Ms. Threadgould said. “As for holiday decorating, I still typically do it with the mind-set of upcycling, but I look to materials that have more value. Maybe it’s less single-use plastic and more things that have a chip in them.”   She has lately made a candelabra from battered teacups, and salvaged cookie cutters during a clean-out of her mother’s home of 30 years to use as napkin rings.   “I have taken stripy sweaters and turned them into Christmas stockings,” she said, “and I’m still making light fixtures from soda bottles and old surveyor’s tripods, but I’m in a purge state right now, and going forward I don’t think I want to make too much more stuff.”   How do you understand zero waste? Nora Abousteit, whose company, CraftJam, offers workshops in all manner of crafts, including wreath making, calligraphy and wooden ornaments said, “for me it’s not plastic and something I can reuse. Or I’ve already used.”   The Amazon box, this year’s scourge, is good for “snowy city landscapes” — cut them out and paint everything white, Ms. Abousteit said — or slice up old Kleenex boxes, as she does.   Use a darning needle and colored yarn to stitch craft paper together and elevate your wrapping game. Slice toilet paper rolls into discs and pinch and glue them into star shapes. Walnut shells can be packaging for tiny gifts, like a Borrower’s cunning innovation.   “The thing about holiday décor is that anything can be material,” said Ms. Churchill, the textile designer. “I’m a big fan of grocery store fliers and newspaper.”   She also felts old sweaters, using a small-scale needle felter, to make ornaments. “You just stab the needle into the sweater and it starts to mat and then you can cut it into shapes,” she said. “You could do it watching TV and get out a lot of aggression.”   Ms. Churchill usually buys houseplants to use as Christmas trees, though she said she has reached maximum capacity in her Brooklyn apartment and this year may employ her rubber plant. “It’s gotten pretty big,” she said. “It might just be its time.”   Most cities collect Christmas trees and chip them into mulch; and the trees themselves are a renewable crop. Yet their production involves resources like water and sometimes chemical additives like pesticides, along with fuel to harvest and deliver them. It’s complicated.   An unlikely solution to the Christmas tree problem is to procure an Evergleam, the hipster-kitschy aluminum tree and midcentury artifact now celebrating its 60th birthday. Early selling points were removable limbs that slid into a sleeve and a telescoping trunk, the whole contracting into an easily stored box.   Such innovation preserved the trees so well that it prefigured their revival. You can find hundreds, perhaps thousands, on eBay, in a range of prices and in seemingly perfect condition.   The Aluminum Specialty Company in Manitowoc, Wis., made between three million and five million trees before ceasing production in about 1971, said Joe Kapler, the lead curator at the Wisconsin Historical Society, which shows off its collection of Evergleams in an exhibition each holiday season.   “It’s amazing how they’ve made a comeback,” Mr. Kapler said, adding that his show is now in its 10th year, and ever more popular for its immersive, Instagrammable settings — a complete replica of a midcentury living room visitors are encouraged to use as a selfie backdrop.   But don’t call the Evergleam an artificial tree, Mr. Kapler said mock-sternly, dismissing the plastic pine facsimiles that began to appear in the late ’60s. “It’s an aluminum tree,” its very own genus.  

Go-Go Goes Eco

  Those who throw parties on a grand scale have been educating themselves in sustainability for decades.   Materials for the Arts, for example, a program run by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs that accepts fabric, furniture, paper products, art supplies and more and donates those materials to nonprofits and schools, is now 40 years old and long a beneficiary of the city’s post-gala surplus. You too can think creatively about the afterlife of your own at-home props.   David Stark, a brand experience designer in New York whose clients include Target, “Saturday Night Live” and Uniqlo, is particularly skilled in low- or zero-waste productions. “If you’re going to throw stuff away, or not store it to repurpose for another event,” he said, “what would it be like if the stuff told a story and then had a life after you used it?”   For a recent party given by the skin care brand Kiehl’s, Mr. Stark’s team built a juice bar from enormous cardboard mailing tubes and misfit fruit, the bruised and imperfect fruits that are discarded by growers as unfit for supermarket produce.   Afterward, they gave the tubes to the Bronx Zoo so the tigers could use them as toys. Yes, they became tiger toys, and yes, there are photos. (You’re welcome.) “We’ve been trying to save the planet since Greta was in kindergarten,” said James LaForce, a public relations executive, referring to Greta Thunberg, this year’s Time magazine star.   He and his husband, Stephen Henderson’s annual holiday party, with a guest count that hovers around 800, is a good place to search for sustainable decorating tips.   They have been hosting it for 20 years and are scrupulous about their waste habits. They cater it themselves, with Mr. Henderson doing all the cooking, and they pride themselves on producing as little food waste as possible.   “We always bring several boxes of Ziploc bags to the party, in case there are leftovers and we send everyone home with goody bags,” Mr. LaForce said, adding that all the food is bite-size hors d’oeuvres or cookies. (Things that are half-eaten, and scraps from Mr. Henderson’s cooking are collected and driven in their Tesla to a compost pile near their house upstate.) “Yes, we are using brand-new Ziploc bags for this. However, at home, we wash them out in the dishwasher and reuse them until they have holes.   “Similarly, we reuse and repurpose a lot of the costume elements from our annual tableaux vivant,” Mr. LaForce said. “We’ve used the same Santa costume every year for the past decade, and at this year’s party, which will be at Judson Memorial Church and is a memorial service for Santa, we’ll use the costume again, even though Santa will be in a coffin. We keep all our serving pieces, décor elements and costumes carefully stored and labeled: ‘doctors’ uniforms,’ ‘sailor,’ ‘barnyard animals’ in our basement upstate.”   But the real décor at this holiday party will be the go-go dancers, bedazzled with black Speedos and body paint in the form of black and white candy canes. “We always have go-go dancers,” Mr. LaForce said. “Doesn’t everyone? So, each year, I diligently collect the Speedos from the dancers at the end of the night so they can be used again the next year.”   Pressed on this point, he admitted: “There has been Speedo loss.”   Beyond a profligacy with men’s bathing suits or a stubborn fondness for sparkly paper, the wasteful behavior that is a true mark of this holiday season — and a more reliable engine of our doom — is the proliferation of Amazon boxes piling up on doorsteps and in apartment lobbies.   As Ms. Salzman, the brand expert, said, “This is the last year where gifting is even going to be appropriate.”   She was not talking about reviving the pious holiday practice of the last decade of buying a baby goat in your daughter’s name for a weaving collective in a third-world country and proclaiming that transaction on a holiday card that obviates the need to stuff her stocking with a pair of Madewell jeans. “We are talking about less is more,” Ms. Salzman said. “And less can be nothing.”

What’s the ultimate destination of consumer goods? For many if not most products, it’s not actually the customer or end user – landfill is the last link in the chain. We have come a long way since King Camp Gillette created the first product designed to be thrown away. Today our whole culture seems designed to be disposable: from single-use plastics to chain store coffee cups; from needlessly shrink-wrapped fruit and veg to huge swaths of cardboard used to protect sheets of paper (yes, really). But revolution is in the air, with consumers increasingly concerned about the world of waste that we have created. There’s just one problem: as a species, we simply haven’t learned how to wean ourselves off our addiction to plastic and other waste generated in the supply chain. Much as we might want to reduce our waste, not many of us are quite ready for bamboo toothbrushes and home-made washing powder. If we’re serious about reducing the billions of tons of plastic and other waste that gets sent to landfill or pollutes our rivers and seas, we need the corporate world to come up with creative solutions that will enable us to enjoy our products – without further contributing to the environmental apocalypse. Garbage pile in trash dump or landfill   Circular supply chains As with so much in life, it is often as useful to look backwards as forwards for solutions to today’s waste crisis. People from the past would think it absurd to use a cup just once before chucking it in the bin, and we are belatedly coming back to this rather obvious conclusion, with many coffee shops offering discounts for customers who bring their own. PROMOTED Important as small steps like these may be, it will take much more to win the world’s wider waste problem. Yet the same principles of reduce, reuse and repurpose – usually overshadowed by the other “R”, recycle – will be absolutely critical in this battle. And that will require fundamental and far-reaching changes in our supply chains. Where once the supply chain was linear and ended with the customer – or, more realistically, in landfill or the oceans – tomorrow’s supply chain will be circular, designed to foster more reduction, reuse and repurpose through secondary, sustainable business models. In fact, we’re already seeing important steps in this direction, not least in the Loop shopping platform. A partnership between major consumer goods firms including P&G, Unilever and Nestle, together with recycling firm TerraCycle, Loop will enable shoppers to consume products in refillable, reusable packaging. This model, barely any different from old bottle deposit schemes that many can still remember, can be taken still further. In theory, there’s nothing to stop us buying products like shampoo in our own personal bottles which we fill up from a tap in the supermarket. But if we are to move from landfill to refill, the corporate world will have to rethink their entire approach to supply chains, moving from linear to circular models. Moreover, circularity is not only about returns. It’s also about the front end of the supply chain – procurement, provenance of product and ethical sourcing. Only then can a supply chain be truly sustainable, ethical, and circular. The technology challenge Let’s not pretend that circular supply chains are going to be easy or cheap to implement. They will, for example, require investment in new infrastructure to change the way that goods are stored and delivered. Let’s also not forget that one of the roles of packaging is to make stacking and storage easier, and also to keep perishable products properly preserved. Changing the way that we ship these goods around the world and to their final destination will be an enormous challenge. How we move IT towards circularity lies in technologies such as knowledge databases, or knowledge graphs, which allow for many-to-many relationships with data, thus moving away from linear, point-to-point, start and end processes. This is critical if enterprises are to make a switch to circularity sooner rather than later. For example, integrating AI and machine learning can give a supply chain its ‘eyes and ears’. Connecting physical technology like smart sensors and cameras to back-end systems will introduce ‘guaranteed’ transparency, making provenance and ethical operations visible in real-time. Machine learning increases demand accuracy, which makes supply more efficient, reducing unnecessary production and thus waste. ing new models of reuse, where creative use of new and existing technologies will be key. Playing into growing consumer interest in ethical supply chains, returnable packaging company CupClub tracks cups, lids and cases using RFID technology, enabling consumers to see where their packaging travels and ends up. Technology can also educate and incentivise people to engage in recycling, reusing and reducing their waste – like QR codes that inform customers that their packaging is recyclable. Future supply chain technology is also likely to have a strong emphasis on social media integration, which will be key for educating and informing consumers about new ways to reduce and reuse, while incentivising them to take part in sustainability initiatives. Beyond technology But the real challenge is not technological. If we are to create truly circular supply chains, it will require a thoroughly holistic approach; one that brings retailers, manufacturers and customers together in a fully integrated way, so that each one understands their own unique responsibilities in winning the war on waste. While supply chain technology today is focused on issues such as optimising journeys and enabling just-in-time delivery, the next generation of tools will be about bringing together these disparate groups in the shared endeavour of reducing waste. To ensure sustainable, circular supply chains actually make an impact and improve a business from the ground up – and to sell in sustainability to any naysaying board members – thinking outside the box is key. The name of the game is establishing new, sustainable business models which bring new revenue possibilities. This could be taking accountability for no-longer-wanted products – let’s take servers for example. Businesses could up the possibility for customers to return their old server and get a discount on a new one, and then involve suppliers in refashioning and repurposing the old server to create a new line of second hand business. This way, every player in the supply chain benefits, while also doing the right thing for the planet. Only then can organisations create a triple bottom line structure that delivers unmatched business value. Everyone has a role to play in building a cleaner, less wasteful world. We have a golden opportunity to deliver a better future with today’s technologies – all it takes is the will to make it happen. Businesses and consumers alike should do everything they can to not throw this golden opportunity away.