Christmas in numbers!💯

Christmas is just around the corner, five days away I think, and I'm so excited! I don't want to lower the spirits of anyone who's celebrating, but I do want to make sure everyone knows how to make all their celebrations less harmful to the environment. 

1. We buy 6 million rolls of Sellotape to wrap our presents with every year in the UK. What's wrong with sellotape? Well, it is made of polypropylene (a plastic that people often think is recyclable when it is not) and this then makes recycling the paper harder.  So, also thinking about using newspaper or brown paper you can actually find in some Amazon parcels that I mentioned in my first blog Wrapping Presents, try to substitute plastic sticky tape for something else. I have paper tape, which I believe is good for the environment, and works just as well as plastic ones - or you could go for the old string or ribbon.  And make sure you save the string or ribbon around this year's presents to use next year! 
2. We spend £1.6 billion on food at Christmas - as a nation - and we waste around 17% of that (I think, if I calculated correctly... well, we waste £275 million of it anyway, if you want it exact). We also waste around 270,000 tonnes of food at Christmas - which includes 74 million mince pies! I've already talked about food waste before, and how to stop it. You can easily do leftover food buffets, which is where you get all the food you didn't eat at meals, and then make a buffet out of it, unless of course the food is moldy. This will probably save a lot of food, since if you make too much of something it is so bad if you throw most of it away.
3. 1.7 billion Christmas cards are sent every year in the UK. That's almost 2 billion... and since sending one produces around 140 grams of carbon dioxide, sending 2 billion would be a crazy amount. Then, there's also looking at what is on the card, what it's made out of and where it was made. If there's a lot of glitter, or even just a tiny bit, it will be harmful to the oceans and indirectly to humans; then considering product miles, there will be a lot of greenhouse gasses released in the air, depending on what its transport is. So, maybe either try making your own cards and sending them (so that the card doesn't travel from where it was made to where you buy it) or somehow tell them in another way that you 'wish them a merry Christmas and a happy new year'.

Thank you for reading! Next time I write, it will be after Christmas and the countdown to the 25th December will begin again!😂 

Violet

         xxx