Americans are generating waste at an unprecedented rate. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the generation of municipal solid waste (from clothing, and food and personal items, for example) was 262.4 million tons in 2015, the most recent data available. That’s an increase from 259 million tons in 2014 and 208.3 million tons in 1990.
Thanks to a growing awareness of the role that waste can play in accelerating climate change, individuals and companies are increasingly making an effort to recycle.
To help with this effort, more and more innovators are stepping onto the scene. One such company, Terracycle, partners with businesses and municipalities to promote reuse of difficult-to-recycle materials, such as cigarette butts, diapers, and packaging scrap.
Through its program Loop, consumers can purchase products like Häagen-Dazs, Coca-Cola, and Nivea in reusable containers instead of disposable ones, and Terracycle will pick them up for refill when they’re finished.
“The thing we’re doing is trying to make it easy for people to act more sustainably,” said Tom Szaky, CEO of Terracycle, which is based in Trenton, New Jersey. “With Loop, for example, one of the key attributes is ‘How do we make the behavior as close to a disposable experience as possible, while acting reusable?’”
Getting more businesses and consumers to recycle requires creative approaches like these — that is, those that help instrument an unconscious shift in behavior.
At what cost?
In his 17 years of experience in the recycling field, Szaky says an increasing number of businesses are making recycling a priority, but often, cost is a hurdle. However, more and more consumers are taking a stand, and demanding sustainability from the companies from which they purchase.
“There is a growing will [to recycle], but it’s because a growing number of people are outraged across the world,” he said, adding that bans on plastic bags and straws in Europe, and a ban on disposable food-service packaging waste in Canada came only after protests led to legislation change. “That is when corporations start waking up en masse.”
Regardless, consumers have the power to effect environmental change daily, Szaky pointed out.
“We vote multiple times a day for the future we want with what we buy, and retailers and brands react to that vote through market research and understanding our desires, and that’s what they then produce more of,” he said. “The problem is we’re doing that all unconsciously, so if we shift that understanding, all the power goes to the people, and we can very quickly shift the landscape of what is made and how companies work.”
Beauty entrepreneur Fran Miller has always been guided by quality, consumer needs, and thoughtful design. “These elements are constantly evolving for me,” she says. Her evolution is made clear now, five years after launching her oil-centric skin-care line F. Miller, as she celebrates the brand’s relaunch. Why a relaunch? “So much is changing in the natural beauty landscape,” she explains, “mostly for the better.” But there is a lot of greenwashing taking place in beauty spaces too. In response, Miller took a year to double-down on finding the most sustainable producers and environmentally friendly packaging, and sourcing things as locally as possible. With the help of U.S.-based recycling company TerraCycle, she also managed to make the F. Miller Toronto studio close to waste-free. “It’s the same but different, I like to say,” she says. The range is still made up of five oils (face, body, eye, hair, and lip balm), but it is the details we don’t see that make all the difference, to us and to Mother Earth.
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% more stuff than they usually do — over 1 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. Churchill, 35, is a textile artist and author leery of waste and always on the lookout for fabric she can salvage and repurpose, 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 the orphan scraps into beautiful new pieces.
The Enviro-Elves
Churchill is one in a cohort of makers, amateurs and professionals dedicated to a sustainable holiday this year: a redemptive, perhaps preemptive, precursor to sober January.
Think comestible and compostable, as Antonia Pitica does, when you trim your tree and adorn your table. Pitica, 28, is an owner of Eco Roots, a company in Aspen, Colorado, 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 R’s,” Threadgould said. “As for holiday decorating, I still typically do it with the mindset 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, 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 Churchill, the textile designer. “I’m a big fan of grocery store flyers 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.”
Churchill usually buys houseplants to use as Christmas trees, though she said she has reached maximum capacity in her Brooklyn, New York, 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 Co. in Maniowic, Wisconsin, made between 3 million and 5 million trees before ceasing production in about 1971, said Joe Kapler, 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,” 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, 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 skin care brand Kiehl’s, 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.
“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.
The annual holiday party he and his husband, Stephen Henderson, throw, 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 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,” LaForce said, adding that all the food is bite-size hors d’oeuvres or cookies. (Things that are half-eaten, and scraps from 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,” 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,” 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 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 developing 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,” 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.”
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.
The polar ice caps are melting before our eyes. Artificial snow will not be de rigueur this year.
o
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.
o 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.
o
o
o
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.
2020 is finally here, and it's that time of year where we get to play Nostradamus and tell you where the future of branding and package design is heading. This is the final installment in our 9-part Trend Report for 2020; to view the other sections, click on the following hyperlinks to read about Brand Merch',The Rise of Non-Alcoholic Booze, White Claw Summer, Monochromatic Packaging, Patterns,The Plant-Based World, Non-Binary Branding, and Flexible Logos.Cactus juice. Mushrooms. Orange peels. Seaweed. Bamboo. Lobster shells. Cork. Banana leaves and leather. Wood. Algae. Avocado pits. Fruit and vegetable peels from apples and potatoes. Wetland weed. That off-putting UFO-like disc used in kombucha called a SCOBY.
No, it’s not some weird salad your crystal-wearing Aunt who lives in Joshua Tree brought to Thanksgiving this year, we’re talking about new packaging substrates that can replace plastic—we’re talking about material innovation.
For the last few years, there’s been no bigger story in the packaging industry than the single-use plastic crisis. We’re past alarm bells about plastic straws and the major-brand-punted waste goals of 2025, as well as the fatigue that comes with seeing a daily news story about how we’re either still polluting the oceans or when climate change will finally do us in.
Because at some point, you have to innovate yourself out of the situation, and that’s just what a lot of folks are trying to do. Now, the designer mantra is less pearl-clutching, more doing. You’ll find designers sick of an endless carousel of plastics that don’t break down, looking for not only newfound inspiration but real, viable solutions.
Most plastic will not get recycled. It’s the truth. Our current system is overburdened, and packaging with flexible plastic or mixed materials will likely never make it through a recycling facility and will go straight to landfill or get burned. So you’ll find scientists and researchers like Sandra Pascoe Ortiz developing new materials by juicing cactus leaves. The sugars and gum contained in cactus juice make it a natural polymer, one that’s not only edible but biodegradable and will break down within 2-3 months if buried in soil, and significantly less if you compost it.
There are some materials that we can readily access from the ocean too—seaweed is simple to harvest, and it grows up to 30 times faster than conventional crops, plus it eats carbon. Evoware, the Circular Design Challenge winner, is seaweed-based packaging that can get applied in food sachets, personal care products, and medical supplies.
If you brand it beautifully and talk up the material’s seemingly unlimited potential, as Julia Marsh did with her thesis-turned-design-studio-and-flexible-packaging start-up Sway, you can captivate others with its regenerative possibilities. “Inspired...by the benevolent nature of seaweed,” this isn’t the green and brown-hued environmental activism we’ve grown accustomed to over the years. It transforms what typically gets viewed as a nuisance that washes up on the beach into something majestic, something that's always been a part of the natural world that undulates and, yes, sways, essentially rebranding it.
In some cases, the product can even become the packaging, because why design graphics when you can make the packaging a beautiful centerpiece? Designer mi Zhu created Soapack, sustainable toiletry products made from a vegetable oil-based soap. As we wrote last July, “The variations in color come from natural dying pigments found in minerals, plants, and flowers. From there, each bottle is formed in a mold and then coated with a thin layer of beeswax to waterproof them.”
You can also make your packaging fun. Get rid of the plastic wrapper like Kit-Kat did for the Japanese market and use origami paper (OK, we’re biased because it’s a shout-out for the packaging nerds, but still). Creating something that lives outside of its primary use can create a pure moment of joy, transforming a mundane wrapper into something delightful.
And if we want to talk about revolutionary materials, then we need to consider PHA, otherwise known as polyhydroxyalkanoates. You can find this natural polyester made from bacterial fermentation in the as-of-yet-but-soonish bottled water brand Cove. Aside from fully breaking down in compost or landfill, it also considered marine-degradable, meaning that if you happened to be an awful person and wanted to throw the bottle away in the ocean, it would thoroughly degrade (seriously though, don’t do that).
And while we want everyone to get excited about mushrooms and banana leaves, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention some of the highly recyclable substrates brands know and love like aluminum and glass, and specifically with how Loop is using them to create refillable packaging.
Created by TerraCycle, Loop is a back-to-basics solution where you shop for some of your favorite brands like Häagen-Dazs ice cream or Hellmann’s Mayonaise, and it ships to you in a refillable vessel that you pay a deposit for. Once finished, you return the container to TerraCycle so it can be cleaned and reused.
Brands are genuinely excited about Loop, and while no one is exactly sure whether or not it’s going to work on a long-term basis, it does present consumers with an entirely new way to interact with the products they can consume, it’s one that gives them a nostalgic taste of yesteryear (bringing back the milkman they claim), that ties into having an immediate effect on wasteful packaging. Designers and brands are free to create reusable packaging that’s not only environmentally friendly but beautiful and near-permanent.
So while plastic isn’t going away in the immediate future, there are plenty of new options for brands and packaging designers to play with. And while scalability might seem damn near impossible, it’s a marathon, not a 50-yard dash to a plastic-free grocery store, though we might be getting pretty close to that too.
Exciting times indeed.
A Jersey Shore community is undertaking an innovation solution to a problem that has long plagued beaches: cigarette butts.
Cape May County’s North Wildwood is partnering with TerraCycle, the world’s leader in the collection and repurposing of complex waste streams, to recycle the cigarette butts, which the company says it the world’s most littered item.
According to officials, North Wildwood will collect and ship the cigarette butts to TerraCycle, which will then process them into plastic pellets for use in a variety of recycled products — like shipping pallets, ashtrays, and park benches — while the remaining tobacco will enter a composter.
If not recycled, plastic cigarette filters will remain in the environment long after the paper and tobacco has decomposed, according to the company.
To encourage the proper disposal — and then easy collection — of cigarette butts, the municipality has installed receptacles at each of the city’s beach and boardwalk entrances.
The city decided to install the receptacles after smoking was prohibited on North Wildwood’s boardwalk and in-response to the statewide smoking ban recently implemented on New Jersey beaches.
The project was funded by a small grant from Sustainable Jersey, a nonprofit organization that provides tools, training and financial incentives to support community sustainability programs.
In 2017, Clean Ocean Action volunteers found 29,000 cigarette butts, 7,172 cigar tips, 1,900 empty cigarette packs, and 1,150 lighters on the state’s beaches.
Todo o início de ano é hora de renovar o material escolar dos filhos e muitas vezes não sabemos o que fazer com lápis, caneta, apontadores e demais materiais de escrita que não servem mais para o uso. Então, traga esses objetos para a sede do TRE Tocantins e deposite nas caixas de acrílico disponíveis ao lado da porta do elevador, no 2º e 4º andares.
Não dá mais para continuarmos com vícios antigos dentro de casa, precisamos pensar em sustentabilidade em casa, em pequenas ações que minimizem o impacto negativo que deixamos no nosso ambiente. Na verdade, já deveríamos estar pensando em como melhorar o ambiente, em tudo o que estragamos, nossos filhos irão nos cobrar por isso. Esse texto não é nada profundo, ainda é o básico de sustentabilidade em casa, você já coloca em prática?
Shaving is a daily ritual for millions of men and women worldwide. Unfortunately, most commercial shaving supplies aren’t environmentally friendly. Plastic razor waste aside, ingredients in shaving products may harm your body and the environment. For example, many popular shaving creams contain triethanolamine (a combination of ethylene oxide and ammonia) and propylene glycol — a main ingredient in antifreeze and brake fluid. Contact with triethanolamine has been linked to allergic reactions while contact with propylene glycol has been connected to allergies, eczema, and asthma.
Shaving without mindfully sourcing your supplies puts harmful chemicals like propylene glycol and triethanolamine back into the water ecosystem. These chemicals get absorbed by fish and other organic matter and can end up back on someone’s kitchen table.
Canned shaving creams also contain hydrocarbonpropellants like butane or propane to make the product foam. Hydrocarbons are harmful to the environment because they’re a source of greenhouse gases.
The good news? Nontoxic shaving supplies exist and building an eco-friendly shaving kit won’t cost as much as you think. From your toiletry bag to your razor, here are seven must-have supplies for your eco-friendly shaving kit.
1. An Eco-Friendly Vegan Toiletry Bag
A vegan toiletry bag is the foundation for an earth-friendly shaving kit, but finding one that’s also eco-friendly isn’t easy. The majority of leather alternatives use polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a toxic material that isn’t biodegradable. Conventional cotton farmers use herbicides and pesticides, so avoid grabbing a toiletry bag off the department store shelf without checking what it’s made of.
Recommended Vegan Toiletry Bags
There’s a new vegan leather made from pineapple leaves called Piñatex. This leather-like material is made by a company called Ananas Anam, and is being used by several big brands including Hugo Boss. Pineapple leaves are a byproduct of existing agriculture so there’s less environmental impact.
Although sourcing pineapple leaves doesn’t adversely impact the environment, turning the leaves into leather requires using a petroleum-based resin, which isn’t biodegradable. Ananas Anam is working with a leading Dutch textile company to create a bio-resin alternative. Considering most synthetic vegan leather contains PVC, which releases dangerous dioxins, Piñatex is a safer and less damaging option.
If you’d like a toiletry bag made with this leather alternative, head over to Etsy for a Piñatex toiletry bag handmade in Belgium.
If you prefer the look and feel of cotton, Terra Thread offers a selection of vegan, fair trade, GOTS certified organic cotton pouches in various sizes.
Choosing an eco-friendly vegan toiletry bag says you care about people, too. Although leather is a popular option for toiletry bags, the leather industry exposes workers in developing countries to toxic chemicals, acids, and solvents that can cause serious, long-term harm.
2. Metal Razor
Get ready to shave like your grandparents! Old-school wet shaving tools are making a comeback because they’re affordable and they produce a cleaner, closer shave than anything you’ll get from a disposable or cartridge razor.
You can pick up one of these best-selling metal safety razors from Amazon in various styles, including different colors and varying handle lengths. Women who use safety razors to shave their legs prefer long handles and many people prefer short-handled safety razors for traveling. Note: If you’re traveling with a safety razor, the blades are not allowed in carry-on luggage.
While some brave men and women opt for a classic straight razor, most prefer a double-edged safety razor. Safety razors made from steel or chrome are built to last for generations. You could probably use your great grandfather’s razor and just replace the blade!
Still Not Ready to Switch to a Reusable Razor?
Recycling disposable razors isn’t profitable for waste management companies because the materials cost more to process than they’re worth. But if you’re not ready to try a reusable safety razor —or willing to endure the sharp learning curve (pun intended) to shave with a straight razor — you may be able to continue using disposable razors without tossing them into a landfill.
Qualified businesses and organizations that are willing to make a small effort can become collection points to gather disposable razors for recycling. In 2019, TerraCycle, a company that’s committed to recycling “un-recyclable” materials, launched a free razor return program with Gillette. You simply sign up online and provide your organization’s address. If your organization qualifies, you will receive a collection bin and TerraCycle will list the organization’s address on their map as a public drop-off point. When the bin is full, seal and send the bin to TerraCycle and request a new bin.
The program accepts cartridge heads and razors from all brands, including used blades from safety razors. Learn more about TerraCycle’s free Gillette Razor Recycling Program.
3. A Tin To Collect Used Blades for Recycling
Part of being environmentally responsible means using products that produce minimal waste, and that includes your used blades. You don’t need to shove used blades into the wall like your grandfather did. Metal safety razor replacement blades can now be recycled, making a safety razor as eco-friendly as a straight razor. But don’t toss them in your recycling bin; used blades are a safety hazard for recycling workers. Collect them in a secure metal tin, and when it’s full, take it to a drop-off location for TerraCycle’s Gillette Razor Recycling program, mentioned above. You can search for a drop-off location near you on TerraCycle’s interactive map.
4. Coconut Oil
Pre-shave oil is important for both men and women. Today’s disposable razor shaving culture has eliminated the use of pre-shave oil, but if you want a close shave without razor bumps, rashes, or nicks, you need pre-shave oil. Instead of buying small packages of chemical-based products down the shaving aisle, try coconut oil.
You can buy coconut oil in the grocery store in small jars, but if you already use coconut oil for other purposes like cooking, oil pulling, or conditioning your dog’s coat, get a giant tub from a bulk store like Costco.
To use coconut oil as a pre-shave oil, rub some in your hands (or heat it in a pan in the winter) and rub a generous amount on the area you’re going to shave just prior to applying shaving cream. The oil will provide extra glide for your razor.
If you’re allergic to coconuts, try jojoba oil.
5. Handmade Shaving Cream or Shaving Soap
Ditch the canned stuff and whip up a batch of homemade shaving cream. Canned shaving cream is expensive and the chemical ingredients dry out your skin. Making your own shaving cream gives you full control over the ingredients you absorb into your skin.
If you have soap making experience or you want to learn a new skill, follow these instructions to make your own shaving soap. If you’re not a soap maker or just want a quick option, DIY shaving cream is an easy project.
Alternatively, you can buy handmade shaving soap from a crafter on Etsy or Amazon and support a small business. Shaving soap may come in a puck, squeeze tube or bar. Here are some soaps to consider:
If you use shaving soap, you might consider two more tools for your shaving kit: a shaving brush to create and apply lather and a scuttle or shaving bowl.
If you’re new to shaving soap, it’s best to practice creating lather by using a scuttle. However, as time goes by you might switch to lathering directly on your body. Some men prefer to create lather directly on their face and some women prefer creating lather directly on their legs.
7. A Washcloth
Those disposable face wipes floating around in your toiletry bag may be handy, but they’re not eco-friendly. Replace them with a washcloth, soap, and water. You don’t really need fancy wipes to wash your face.
What’s inyoureco-friendly shaving kit?
Do you have an eco-friendly shaving kit? What’s inside? Share your tips in the Earthling Forum or the comments below so we can all start finding eco-friendly replacements for products we can’t live without.
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% more stuff than they usually do — over 1 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. Churchill, 35, is a textile artist and author leery of waste and always on the lookout for fabric she can salvage and repurpose, 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 the orphan scraps into beautiful new pieces.
The Enviro-Elves
Churchill is one in a cohort of makers, amateurs and professionals dedicated to a sustainable holiday this year: a redemptive, perhaps preemptive, precursor to sober January.
Think comestible and compostable, as Antonia Pitica does, when you trim your tree and adorn your table. Pitica, 28, is an owner of Eco Roots, a company in Aspen, Colorado, 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 R’s,” Threadgould said. “As for holiday decorating, I still typically do it with the mindset 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, 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 Churchill, the textile designer. “I’m a big fan of grocery store flyers 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.”
Churchill usually buys houseplants to use as Christmas trees, though she said she has reached maximum capacity in her Brooklyn, New York, 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 Co. in Maniowic, Wisconsin, made between 3 million and 5 million trees before ceasing production in about 1971, said Joe Kapler, 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,” 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, 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 skin care brand Kiehl’s, 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.
“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.
The annual holiday party he and his husband, Stephen Henderson, throw, 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 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,” LaForce said, adding that all the food is bite-size hors d’oeuvres or cookies. (Things that are half-eaten, and scraps from 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,” 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,” 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 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 developing 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,” Salzman said. “And less can be nothing.”
