2009 Holiday Green Goals & Tips

For the next two weeks, please try to make one or more of the following green tips a goal to stick with:

#1: Wrap gifts in newspaper (comics are great for some fun wrapping!) or brown paper grocery bags, rather than using wrapping paper. It's a great way to reuse, and the materials are more recyclable.

#2: Avoid metallic or foil wrapping paper because they use more resources to manufacture and often can't be recycled.

#3: Bring your own bags when gift/food shopping. You may want to ask for reusable bags as a holiday gift. The best kind are those that fold in on themselves for easy transport. Stash them in your purse or backpack after use so you're never without them!

#4: Skip the gift box, unless you're reusing one from last year. Often they aren't necessary, they use energy to be produced, and they generate more waste with all that tissue paper. (Of course you can solve the trash issue by reusing boxes and saving tissue paper--see tip #5!)

#5: Salvage wrapping paper, tissue paper, boxes and bows. Rather than rip paper open, undo it carefully, remove the tape so it doesn't stick to itself, and neatly fold it to a manageable size. Stash it in a gift bag and save it for next year. AVHS Environmental Club secretary Melissa started this last year, and managed to wrap all of her friend's gifts with reused paper this year. (See her blog post about it here. Scroll to the bottom of the post to see the tips.)

#6: If you have a Christmas tree, recycle it. Contact your local garbage collecting service to find out if they have a tree recycling program. Many will pick it up from your curb.

Happy Holidays from AVHS Environmental Club!

Weekly Goal #1: Say no to plastic water bottles

Our first Environmental Club Green Goal was to use only reusable water bottles for a week or more. If you could not get a reusable one, we asked you to reuse the same plastic bottle over and over. (This can be dangerous, as plastic breaks down and can leach into your water, but at least it reduces waste somewhat.)

Most people gave it a try, and many of us already use reusable bottles consciously. Let's all try to get a reusable water bottle sometime soon so we can really eliminate that source of waste.

Check out this TreeHugger.com article to learn more about why you should say no to plastic water bottles: A World of Reasons to Ditch Bottled Water by Union of Concerned Scientists

Bulletin Green Tip #2: Turn off those holiday lights!

From sundown until the time you go to sleep, your LED (hopefully!) holiday lights (inside and out) can and should be gleaming all of their holiday spirit for the world. But once your head hits the pillow, those lights should be off. Leaving them on all night wastes a lot of energy, and no one is going to see them at midnight, one, two, three o'clock in the morning! So turn them off before bed and don't turn them back on until sundown the next day. It seems like this would be an obvious way to conserve, but it's always good to be reminded.

(This tip can also be found at Green Gal's blog.)

Bulletin Green Tip #1: Bring a reusable lunchbox

Did you know that the average student generates 67 pounds of waste a year bringing a disposable lunch to school? That's a lot of trash when you consider that our school has 2,500 students. That's 167,500 pounds of trash our school generates each year--just from lunches! Imagine the trash generated by every school in the country! So, to help reduce this waste (and to show others the practicality to further reduce waste) bring a reusable lunchbox to school. This is just the first in many steps to reducing your lunchtime waste, but you've got to start somewhere!

Nowadays they make cute purse-like ones, vintage metal lunchboxes, and themed-lunchboxes of a variety of characters, TV shows, and movies. Lunchboxes are no longer something reserved for elementary school students; it's become a trend to have a lunchbox with your favorite band or cartoon. So stop wasting resources, and get yourself a cool lunch box!