Remember our December 19 post about greening your holiday gift wrap by making your own reusable gift bags, and tags from last year's cards? Well, an article that appeared on Science Daily a few days later made the same point in a slightly more shocking way. "According to some estimates 1.5 billion cards and 83 square kilometres of wrapping paper are thrown away by UK residents over the Christmas period. They currently go to landfill or are recycled in local schemes." And that's Great Britain, with a 2011 population of 59 million, compared to the United States' 300 + million.
The point of the article, however, was not to shock the Brits into either mass guilt or better recycling (a 60 percent recycling rate for paper is stated), but to suggest the idea that waste paper can be fermented into biofuel. "If all the UK's discarded wrapping paper and Christmas cards were collected and fermented, they could make enough biofuel to run a double-decker bus to the moon and back more than 20 times, according to the researchers behind a new scientific study."
There's no better way to make the point that reusable gift bags should be on next year's to-do list.
Post and photo by Sierra Club volunteer Rebecca Hammond
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