The holidays are a time for giving. Everywhere you go, people are exchanging thank you cards, gift bags, and brightly wrapped presents. From $20-dollar-limit Secret Santas with co-workers to more heartfelt gift exchanges with friends and family, people are exchanging gifts left and right. But all of these holiday gift-giving festivities generate much waste each year.
It is common knowledge that packaging in general creates a huge environmental problem, with the average Canadian throwing away approximately ½ kg of packaging daily. This problem is especially exacerbated during the holidays due to piles and piles of stuff, all neatly packaged in single-use plastics. In fact, studies estimate that Canadians toss 25% more garbage during the holidays than during any other time of the year.
Wrapping gifts also contributes to this already huge pile of garbage. Most Canadian cities do not recycle foiled or glittery wrapping paper, which means that the vast majority of holiday wrapping paper ends up in the dumpster. Even recyclable wrapping paper and gift bags end up in landfills due to public misinformation and general disregard. As a result, 540,000 tonnes of wrapping paper and gift bags end up in landfills every Canadian holiday season. That’s equivalent to the weight of 100,000 elephants! In addition, we toss out 3,000 tonnes of foil, 6 million rolls of tape, and 2.6 million Christmas cards every year. This makes holiday gift-giving an eco-nightmare.
The rise of e-commerce, which puts already packaged products in even more packaging before shipping it off to people’s doorsteps (often thousands of miles away from the original location), continues to add more and more to our piles of holiday garbage each year. Returned online purchases are also an entire problem of its own. Compared to 5 to 10 percent of in-store purchases, 15 to 40 percent of online purchases are returned, with the volume of returns spiking during the holiday season as people make more purchases. The return rates for things like clothing and shoes are especially higher at about 30 to 40 percent, which can be attributed to things like shoppers trying on multiple colours or sizes before selecting the ones they actually want or the fact that most online retailers’ return policies are highly convenient.
The shocking truth, however, is that many returned online purchases, many of them in perfectly good shape, are often sent straight to landfills. In the retailer’s point of view, hiring workers to check returned products is more expensive than shipping products straight to the dumpster. So naturally, many online retailers choose the latter option.
The mentality with which Canadians shop for themselves and for others during the holidays is also very wasteful. Every year from Thanksgiving to New Years, we are bombarded with seemingly never-ending sales: Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas sales, Boxing Day the — list goes on and on. From clothing to electronics, many Canadians overindulge in things they don’t necessarily need or even want simply because it’s cheap. The unhealthy consumerist culture of the holiday season fosters an epidemic of excess — an excess to be used only once or twice before meeting its ultimate fate in our landfills and oceans.
The holidays should be a time for giving, but it shouldn’t come at such a cost to our environment. From the moment we order our gifts online (and return the ones we decided we don’t want) to the moment we put those gifts in a glittery (non-recyclable) gift bag to give to our friends and family (who are already swimming in an excess of stuff), we are causing unnecessary damage to our lands and oceans. So as this holiday season comes to an end, it might be a good idea to reflect on the damage we have caused to our environment ever since the first pre-Black Friday sales — to think about all the glitter and glitz that have since ended up in our landfills.
In future gift-giving seasons, as you scramble to get last minute gifts for your loved ones, you might want to keep some of these questions in mind:
How much unnecessary packaging is this object in? Can I recycle any of this?
Do I really need to wrap this gift in non-recyclable wrapping paper? Do I have any saved wrapping paper that I can reuse?
Do I have things like gift baskets that I can put gifts in instead of gift bags to be used once and tossed?
From where is my online purchase being shipped? Is there any way to purchase it locally?
Will I probably be returning this online purchase?
Do I or any of my loved ones really need this item in our lives or am I just buying it because it’s cheap?
Every holiday season, we seem to be swimming in an overabundance of stuff: packaging, wrapping paper, gift bags, online purchases, sales. The most simple question to ask yourself would be if we really need any of it. Do we really need all these packaging and decorations adorning our gifts? Do we even need most of these things to begin with? The holiday season is about giving back to our loved ones; it should be about something bigger than that second Amazon Echo you got for Black Friday or those five extra pairs of jeans you got for 40% off on Boxing Day. Because the holiday season should be about something more than stuff — especially if that stuff comes at such a cost to the world around us.