• If you received gifts in regular wrapping paper, save it and use it to pad around your ornaments and decorations when you put them away.  They make great cushioning paper.  Read about wrapping paper from earth911 who says: “if every American family wrapped just three presents in reused materials, it would save enough paper to cover 45,000 football fields.” If you were careful when opening gifts, you may be able to reuse the wrapping paper for gifts next year.  My father and I wrapped all of our gifts in leftover tissue paper and plain cream colored packaging paper this year.  We also use newspaper which we can then use to start fires with in our woodstove over the winter.
• Of course everyone knows to save your gift bags and reuse them next year.  You can also use them to bag up extra decorations as needed.
• Some places will actually recycle your christmas tree and turn it into mulch.  In Huntsville Alabama there is a Botanical Garden that will do this if you drop the tree off.  Do some research and see who else in your area might be providing this same service.
• Re-gift unwanted gifts. If you feel bad about asking for the receipt to return a gift, and if your gifters don’t have the for-sight to provide you with the receipt just in case, then re-gift the item.  I love regifting, so long as I’m giving it to someone I know will appreciate it.
• In my article about how to reduce paper waste this Christmas, I mentioned that you can donate your christmas cards to St. Jude’s Children’s Ranch to be recycled into new cards.  Make-stuff.com also provides a list of ways you can creatively reuse your christmas cards as well.

What other creative ways do you make your post-holiday clean-up more eco-friendly?

Paper waste is abundant at Christmas time, from holiday cards to wrapping paper.  In the United States an additional 5 million tons of waste is generated during the holidays.

Just think of how much waste is produced by the Christmas Card alone.  Not only are you producing the paper waste of the card itself, but the fuel to send it where it needs to go.  In the UK, over 1 billion Christmas Cards end up in landfills, and 1.9 billion by Americans.   One tree is needed to make up 3,000 cards.  That’s a ton of waste!

Wrapping paper is probably one of the most wasteful things we use during the holidays.  A glorified decorative piece of paper with its inks and dyes, wrapped around a gift for only a few days before being torn off and thrown away.  The paper itself doesn’t burn well because of the inks and dyes, and the burning of those inks and dyes releases harmful chemicals anyway. 4 million tons of wrapping paper and shopping bags are thrown away each holiday season.

How can we reduce our paper waste during the holidays?

Gift Paper:

• A few times I used newspaper we had lying around the house, generally for everyday gifts.
• I’ve wrapped gifts in a nice piece of fabric I had lying around, tyed with a nice piece of string or bow that I also had.  If the receiver does not wish to keep the fabric, I ask for it back to be used again.
• I’ve wrapped gifts in paper bags from the grocery store, which are a perfect canvas for my own custom decorations should I choose to.  An example could be taking a piece of apple or a leaf and painting one side to create your own rustic stamp on the paper.  Personally I think the paper bags look nice and traditional, especially when wrapped with bailing twine.
• Buy recycled wrapping paper with eco-friendly ink.

Greeting Cards:

• Obviously sending no card at all is the best way to reduce waste, but is a hard and undesirable step for some.
• Some like to make their own cards from materials around their house, which is a lovely way to send a custom greeting to a loved one.
• You can also recycle old cards, or cards you have received by cutting off the front and attaching it to another piece of (recycled) paper to resend.  But some view this method as tacky.
• Send an e-greeting to family and friends.  Most people have access to the internet these days, which means most people will have an email account.  Send them an e-greeting instead where you can personalize a message within the card.  Not only does it help save the environment, it saves your wallet too, since these are generally free.
• Buy recycled gift cards with eco-friendly ink.  If you’re going to waste money on cards anyway, may as well put forth the money for nice recycled ones.

Recycling Holiday Waste:

• As mentioned above, you could reuse your own cards to send out each year.
• St. Jude’s Ranch for Children is a nonprofit that uses donated greeting cards to create new card sets.  The proceeds from this go to help abused children.  What a great way to recycle your old greeting cards.
• Be careful when opening gifts wrapped in paper, and see if you can’t reuse that paper again in the future.
• Save the holiday bag you receive and reuse them to gift next year.
• Reuse wrapping paper, envelopes, and/or cards to create your own gift tags.  I’ve used old wrapping paper for gift tags for years.  Simply cut a rectangle and fold it in half.  Write your gift tag in the center and tape to your gift

If you’re the sort of person who reads articles like this, you probably think pretty much everyone knows about CFLs by now.

Think again. Despite widespread availability and dramatically lower prices — name brand CFL bulbs go for about two dollars these days — CFL adoption in the United States remains around 6 percent. The rate is much higher in Europe and parts of Asia. Still, in the largest single consumer market in the world, CFL awareness remains in single digits. Contrast this with a recent survey suggesting up to 34 percent of all Americans believe in UFOs.

Mercury in CFLs

It’s not unreasonable to think that even fewer people know CFLs contain mercury. A small amount, sure: the National Electrical Manufacturers Association recently capped 25 watt CFLs at 5 milligrams per bulb. But as adoption rates rise, so does the importance of sending CFLs to a recycler, rather than the landfill.

Herein lies the problem. While retailers such as Wal-Mart and Home Depot have exhibited environmental leadership by bringing CFLs to market, they’ve been far less forthcoming in taking them back. CFLs can last three to five years under normal use, which means the vast majority of bulbs ever sold are still in service. By 2010, however, The U.S. could be looking at 80 to 100 million improperly disposed CFLs annually if people don’t know any better and convenient recycling isn’t available. That would represent an intolerable toxic burden to our current methods of waste disposal.

CFL Recycling Options

A issue of this size won’t be solved by individual action alone. But if each of us take the initiative to identify our local CFL recycling options now, we can start the process of educating friends and family before their efficient new CFLs are ready for disposal. Want to give it a try? Here are a few places to check:

Your Local Garbage Service

Probably the best place to start is with whoever currently picks up your household trash or recyclables. If you pay for this service, you’ll almost certainly find a customer service number on your bill. Give them a call and ask if they offer CFL or mercury recycling. If not, politely suggest they do so. Here’s an opportunity to write a letter, attend a meeting, or take some other activist role in highlighting the importance of proper CFL disposal. The appropriate follow-up will depend on whether your trash service is privately or publicly held.

Municipal Government

Whether or not local trash service is provided by a private contractor, your local municipality (city, county, or parish) is ultimately responsible for waste disposal.

Most phone directories have a “blue pages” directory of local government agencies. Try the listing for sanitation services. While curbside recycling is by no means universal, your area may have designated drop-off locations or periodic CFL collections. Should your local agency not have any CFL-specific provisions, ask about safe disposal of mercury or fluorescent tubes.

Retailers

Unless you bought CFLs from Ikea, one of the first major vendors to offer a free take-back program, you’re probably going to get some blank stares when you ask the manager of your local store about CFL recycling. It’s worth the effort, though: retailers need to know their customers want safe disposal of the good they purchase. If you bought your CFLs from Wal-Mart, consider contacting their corporate headquarters and asking that they establish a company wide CFL return program.

Earth 911

Earth 911 is probably the United States and Canada’s largest online clearinghouse of recycling information. Visit their site and enter “CFL” and your Zip code in the “Find a Recycling Center” field at the top of each page. Alternately, try “mercury” and “fluorescent bulbs.” If there’s something in your region, it will almost certainly be listed. Earth 911 is currently attempting to expand its coverage to Europe, the first step toward an international registry of recycling options.

Commercial Services

There are a variety of for-profit companies which provide CFL and fluorescent bulb disposal by mail. Failing a local option, these firms represent a responsible and environmentally friendly channel for CFL recycling. Lightbulbrecycling.com, for instance, will send you a handy, postage-paid plastic pail which will accommodate about 30 CFLs — more than most homes will use in many years. Just drop your spent CFLs in their well-engineered pail, and call FedEx for pick-up. The downside is that the service is quite expensive: about $120 per shipment. At today’s prices, this almost triples the unit price of your CFL. On the other hand, with the energy you’ll save with each bulb, you’re still ahead of the game. You’ll also know for sure that your CFLs are being recycled in a safe fashion.

What If All Else Fails?

If none of these options are available to you, there’s a backup plan: storage.

As their name suggests, Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs don’t take up much room. Unless they’re broken or otherwise damaged, CFLs will hold their mercury more-or-less indefinitely. Rather than disposing of them with household trash, simply store expended CFLs until recycling is available in your area. A 5-gallon PVC bucket with sealable top can be scrounged from most construction sites or purchased new for less than ten dollars. It should safely contain a couple dozen bulbs. A sturdy cardboard box lined with a heavy plastic garbage bag should also do the trick. Just place your CFL storage container out of harm’s way so it won’t be dropped, crushed, or otherwise disturbed.

Spread the Word

Once you’ve located CFL recycling near to home, let people know. Offer to take other people’s worn-out CFLs when you recycle your own; organize drop-off programs with churches, clubs, and civic groups; and get the word out about the necessity of safe CFL recycling.

Using less than 30 percent of the power required for a conventional bulb, CFLs represent a tremendous opportunity for energy savings. But they also require special handling if we’d like to keep them from becoming an environmental problem of their own. Feel free to reprint this article in any way. Email it to friends. Be part of the solution.

For information on the proper purchase and selection of CFLs, see the Complete Guide to Living with CFLs.

The world is currently generating between twenty to fifty million metric tons of electronic waste each year. So, during your hour lunch break we managed to dispose of roughly 2300 metric tons of electronic waste. This is something that we should all be conscious of, and given that you are reading this article, means that you probably have access to some sort of electronic device that you will sooner or later dispose of.

Several of the worlds leading manufacturers of this equipment have recently stepped up to either provide services for safer disposal, or have committed to ridding their products of some of their most harmful waste. HP, Dell, LGE, Sony, Nokia, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson have already promised to remove the worst toxic chemicals from their products (BFRs and PVC) by 2009. But what about all of that equipment that is already in circulation? What about all of the computers and cell phones that hit end of life before then?

Depending on what your needs may be, here is one possible solution. Dell has recently started a program that will assist both consumers and businesses to dispose of unwanted electronic equipment in a much better way. For businesses, this process is known as Asset Recovery and basically removes all liability from the business should information from old equipment be compromised. If your business is not currently practicing some type of Asset Recovery plan, you are running a significant risk. Not only does Asset Recovery remove the liability from data loss, but it also protects against fines for illegal disposal of such equipment. For personal use, they have also implemented a donation program that takes used computers and donates them to the National Cristina Foundation to help disabled and economically disadvantaged children and adults in your community. They will even come to your door and pick it up. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

Whether it be for business or personal use, you can now include the disposal of a computer you are purchasing as you are actually purchasing it. So, if you are buying a new PC, make sure to look for this option.

Staples is also working on a computer recycling program that started in May of 2007:

Staples said its program will ship the devices for domestic recycling by Vestal, N.Y.-based Amandi Services, which Staples calls “one of the country’s most experienced and innovative electronics recyclers.” Amandi complies with federal standards for electronics recycling and will take steps to ensure personal data stored on old computers aren’t compromised, Staples says.

Green Fed II was created by the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality to provide students the ability to send electronics for recycling or reuse with no charge.

The program allows private citizens to print off a pre-paid UPS sticker and send away any electronic item by dropping it off at a UPS store. So far over 1,000 tons have been recycled in one year, but the program does not offer a drop-off location so it has been met with some criticism from those who say it is too difficult.

Other E-cycling Resources

United States Environmental Protection Agency Computers & General Electronics

Computer Recycling Center

Share the Technology

Electronic Industries Alliance

Product Stewardship Institute

National Recycling Coalition

Toxic E-Trash: E-cycling Resource Map (from the PBS series Now with Bill Moyers)

All in all, we have a long way to go… but the more people who are aware, and do something about it… well, the closer we’ll be.