Recycling can make Christmas evergreen
By Jim Roth | Phillips Murrah P.C. |
The Journal Record
[ DECEMBER 28, 2009 - OKLAHOMA CITY, OK ] - Each year, more than 50 million Christmas trees are purchased in the U.S. in a traditional exercise of bringing some holiday beauty inside your home. If you bought a live Christmas tree, there are other potential benefits: Live trees have many environmental virtues.
Live Christmas trees are a renewable resource grown on tree farms that are replanted regularly. They contribute to air quality while growing, and almost 90 percent are recycled into mulch. Live trees are usually locally grown and sold, saving both transportation costs and added air pollution.
Christmas trees can be recycled. These cut trees are a useful material for composting and some can even be replanted. Look for tree drop-off locations in your area at www.earth911.com.
After the holidays, you can decorate a tree for the birds – place seed bells, suet, pine cones with peanut butter and seed trays on any tree in your yard. This can be an attractive food source in an otherwise sparse winter setting.
Some holiday gifts need to be bought new, but many gifts are really gestures of thoughtfulness, so there are ways to give more while spending less. If you received something you really don’t need, look for ways you can reuse it by passing it on to someone who can use it. It’s called re-gifting and actually helps those in need.
Many gifts in today’s marketplace come from halfway around the world, and the impact of transportation contributes significantly to greenhouse emissions and climate change. Re-gifting and shopping at local craft fairs and artisan shops are good sources for gifts without the added costs and environmental effects of transportation.
Many electronic items are common holiday gifts. Older models, which are being replaced, should not be discarded to a landfill. The Oklahoma Computer Recyclers facility is dedicated to recycling electronic equipment to protect the environment. Check out http://ok-ewaste.com/.
It’s not too early to start thinking about next Christmas, so consider these tips.
The house with the most lights used to be the best. Times have changed. The cost of electricity goes way beyond the utility bill. Excessive electricity unnecessarily drains natural resources.
Light-emitting diode (LED) holiday lights use up to 95-percent less energy than larger, traditional holiday bulbs and last up to 100,000 hours when used indoors. LED holiday lights use 0.04 watts per bulb, 10 times less than mini-bulbs and 100 times less than traditional holiday bulbs. Over a 30-day period, lighting 500 traditional holiday lights will cost you about $18 while the same number of LED lights costs only 19 cents. If one of the LED lights burns out, the rest of the strand will stay lit.
The amount of holiday cards sold in the U.S. would fill a football field 10 stories high, and requires the harvesting of nearly 300,000 trees. Homemade cards can be more personal and just as appreciated.
Half of the paper America consumes each year is used to wrap and decorate consumer products. In the U.S., the annual trash from gift wrap and shopping bags totals over 4 million tons. If everyone wrapped just three gifts in reused paper or fabric gift bags, it would save enough paper to cover 45,000 hockey rinks.
Nature can furnish a white Christmas, but with a little effort, you can kick in a green one. Happy holidays.
Jim Roth, a former Oklahoma corporation commissioner, is an attorney with Phillips Murrah P.C. in Oklahoma City, where his practice focuses on clean, green energy for Oklahoma.