Setting a Smart Table

Environmentally aware entertaining includes how you prepare your home and set the table.

Holiday entertaining begins with a good home cleaning, says interior designer Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, founder of the popular design blog ApartmentTherapy.com and author of Apartment Therapy: The Eight-Step Home Cure (Bantam Books, 2006). Happily, we have growing choices for nontoxic home cleansers. Look for products free of petrochemicals, phosphates and chlorine and that advertise to be nontoxic and biodegradable. (Some list all the ingredients right on the label to prove they’re eco-friendly.)

When decorating the table, Maxwell suggests keeping things simple and focused on natural materials, such as organic cotton tablecloths and napkins. “One of the biggest things we do in our home is decorate the table with greenery from around the house,” he says. “We walk around and see what we can find: a combination of dry grasses, wild weeds, any type of evergreen sprigs.” Use a downed branch as a structure to support your finds, and colorful fruits and vegetables isn’t taboo after November, says Maxwell: “I consider Christmas to be very similar to Thanksgiving in terms of the festivity and how you want to decorate the table.” For glow, 100 percent beeswax pillar candles are a beautiful, clean-burning, sweet smelling alternative to petro-based paraffins.

Using old china and silver is the ultimate recycling. “It’s about reusing and treasuring our inheritance,” says Maxwell, “not just the earth, but what our parents and grandparents have left to us.” But when you shop for new pieces, he recommends organic materials like wood, ceramic and bamboo over plastic. “Buy something that is compatible with the earth,” Maxwell says, “so whenever you’re done with it, it’ll go back to the earth.”

(Source: EJ Sweden, Green For the Holidays, http://omagazine.info/samsclub/)

Transforming the Holiday Menu

Your guests will eat so well, they won’t even know they’ve gone green.

Eating as if the earth matters (and it does!) isn’t just about bean sprouts and tofu anymore. This year’s eco-enlightened holiday meal includes sustainably grown meats, organic vegetables, fruits and dairy and fine organic wines. Your guests will eat so well, they won’t even know they’ve gone green.

New trends in how food is grown and skyrocketing demand for organics have combined to improve both the availability and the quality of what you can find on supermarket shelves, as well as in gourmet shops and via online purveyors. This 21st-century version of “organic cooking” can be much healthier than “eating as usual” and taste a whole lot better. Plus, every dollar you spend on organic foods tells the food industry that you support sustainable agriculture – and so should they.

(Source: EJ Sweden, Green For the Holidays, http://omagazine.info/samsclub/)

Cleaner Holiday Travel

Even the most eco-aware of us need to fly or drive, especially during the holidays. But while fossil fuel-powered transportation accounts for nearly a third of America’s emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, giving up travel isn’t a good answer to the climate crisis: tourism generates about eight to ten percent of the world’s GDP, and it’s a strong incentive for preserving natural areas as destinations, both here and abroad.

To make the greatest impact on this problem, big systems – like the aviation and auto industries – will need to change. But we as individuals can also act right now to cut or compensate for our travel-related contributions to the climate’s carbon load, by choosing destinations that factor environmental and community sustainability into their operations, and by funding projects that work directly to slow global warming.

(Source: EJ Sweden, Green For the Holidays, http://omagazine.info/samsclub/)

A Better Way to Light Up the Holidays

Holiday lights may help bring joy to the season, but they can also bring added costs to your energy bill. This year, save energy and money by purchasing energy-efficient LED (light-emitting diode) strands to decorate your home or business.

Standard incandescent holiday lights—and even mini-lights—can use a significant amount of energy and regularly involve costly (and irritating) bulb replacements. LED lights produce a bright light for up to 20 holiday seasons!

(Source: Pacific Gas and Electric Company, http://www.pge.com/res/holiday_lighting.html)

Simple Steps to an Earth-Saving Holiday

1. Switch energy-hogging old-fashioned light bulbs for energy-efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs)
2. Bring home the shopping in a reusable cloth bag. Americans throw out around 100 billion plastic shopping bags a year
3. Plug “energy vampires” – televisions, DVD players, stereos, etc. – into a smart power strip that will cut the power when they’re not in use. These devices use electricity even when off, accounting for $80 billion of yearly domestic energy use.
4. Install a water-saving showerhead to reduce the amount of water you are using and energy to heat it
5. Choose decorations made of recycled paper, cloth, or natural materials instead of plastic, as well as candles made from beeswax – they burn longer and smell great
6. Download a Seafood Watch Pocket Guide and serve sustainable fish: mbayaq.org/cr/seafoodwatch.asp
7. Check your car’s tire pressure – if it’s low, you’ll use up more gas per mile
8. For Christmas, spend an afternoon making edible gifts like cookies and candies; pack them in beautiful reusable tins
9. For Hanukkah, select organic ingredients for your latkes and other holiday treats
10. For Kwanzaa, honor the evocation of “roots and branches” by planting and caring for a tree

(Source: EJ Sweden, Green For the Holidays, http://omagazine.info/samsclub/)

The Greenest Tree is One That Grows

The most eco-friendly Christmas tree is one that was never cut down in the first place. One wonderful alternative to buying a cut tree is decorating a tree already growing outside your home. Another is to purchase a live tree and plant it after the holidays. This does take a bit of planning to be successful: The Iowa State University’s Department of Horticulture has a thorough online guide to transplanting a live Christmas tree, at: ipm.iastate.edu/ipm/hortnews and search “Christmas Tree”.

Be sure you puck a tree that will have the best chance to thrive; native species are usually ideal choices, since they’re already adapted to local weather, soil conditions, and rainfall. Contact a local botanic garden, gardening club, or plant nursery for suggestions

Special care during the holidays is essential – the tree’s root ball needs to be kept moist, and the tree should never be kept in over-warm spots, such as next to a fireplace

Decorate the tree only with ornaments and other materials that can be easily and completely removed – no fake snow, people!

Acclimate the tree to cooler temperatures after Christmas by keeping it in a garage or shed for a while, but be sure not to let the root ball freeze.

(Source: EJ Sweden, Green For the Holidays, http://omagazine.info/samsclub/)

Treecycling

Send your decorations back to the earth, not to a landfill

A single Christmas tree can take up to three decades to decompose in a landfill, and last year Americans bought over 30 million cut trees. It’s a garbage crisis that’s even more incredible considering how easy it is to recycle a cut tree, wreath or other “live” decorations.

If you’ve got a yard or garden:

• Lay the tree out where the branches can offer shelter from the winter weather to birds and other wildlife. Adorn the branches with fruit slices, seed cakes, suet bags, or pinecones packed with a mix of peanut butter and seeds
• Prune the branches and place the boughs over perennials to insulate them against winter frost damage
• Saw and split the trunk into kindling for winter gatherings around the fireplace
• Chip the tree and use the chips to mulch around trees, shrubs, and in flowerbeds

Some municipalities are making it easier to give your tree back to the earth. The New York City Department of Sanitation collected just over 147,000 trees for recycling in 2006. Gothamites brought an additional 8,800 trees to the Parks Department’s annual “Mulchfest” were they could also obtain fresh wood chips for their yards, gardens, and sidewalk plantings.

If your city of town doesn’t yet offer post- holiday "treecycling.” Look for other options:

• Golf courses, private gardens or estates open to the public may be collecting trees for mulching
• A local cemetery may take them. Brooklyn, New York’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery lets residents drop their trees and wreaths off after Christmas for chipping into mulch
• Local conservation, hunting and fishing groups may collect Christmas trees to use as habitat for wildlife

And, naturally, be sure to remove all decorations and tinsel from your tree before recycling.

(Source: EJ Sweden, Green For the Holidays, http://omagazine.info/samsclub/)

Greener Gifting

Green means organic, healthy, reusable, sustainable. Gray means polluting, unhealthy, use-it-once-and-throw-it-away. Direct your holiday dollars to creating a green world.

Face it: we can’t simply shop our way out of global warming, or any other big environmental problem. But it is possible to use our dollars to gently nudge large systems in a green direction. Call it strategic consumption: by buying products that do their job more sustainably – like a nontoxic cleaning product or clothing made from organic fabric – we send signals back into the market economy that can create meaningful large-scale changes.

As you select gifts this year, go for the greener option over is grey counterpart, however small the difference. Along with the good this does in the present, it’ll show manufacturers and retailers that there’s a demand for such products – and that we want our consumer goods regulated, produced, marketed, and sold in environmentally sustainable ways.

(Source: EJ Sweden, Green For the Holidays, http://omagazine.info/samsclub/)

Reuse and Recycle

Got stuff to get rid of after the holidays? Don’t treat it like trash.

Being green with your old things is getting easier. Along with donating to thrift shops run by worthy causes, consider freecycling them. People around the globe sign up for these locally based mailing lists, indexed at freecycle.org, where they can both give away and ask for things they need.

Or list stuff on Craigslist, a network of local and largely free classified ad Web sites in over 450 cities worldwide, where you can put things up for sale, barter or to give away free. Find one near you at craigslist.org.

Look for post-holiday electronics collection events (run by municipalities or local nonprofits), where you can drop off your tech gear for recycling for free, safe disposal. Also, some manufacturers take back their products for disposal; call customer service or check the company website.

Some old technology has little practical value – but on special exception is the cell phone. Many groups collect used cell phones to refurbish and redistribute to people who especially need them, from soldiers stationed overseas, to battered women who need to call 911 in an emergency. Check out Charity Guide’s suggestions on how to give your cell phone a second life that will help the lives of others at: charityguide.org/volunteer/fifteen/cell-phone-recycling.htm

(Source: EJ Sweden, Green For the Holidays, http://omagazine.info/samsclub/)