Green Thing Blog

When it comes to Christmas, everyone has their own traditions. You might unwrap your presents after lunch or you might open them before 7.30am, you might send recycled Christmas cards or you might send e-Christmas greetings, you might buy low energy or LED lights for your Christmas tree (something this family in America should have done) or you might decorate yours with old, painted light bulbs and homemade chocolate Rudolfs. My dad’s friend and his brother send each other the same two Christmas cards back and forth each year with the wrong name scribbled out and the right name written over it.

Whatever you normally do, it’s easy to make small changes - which usually turns out to be enhancements, employing clever tricks and saavy thinking to master the art form of using everything up and wasting nothing.

Recycled and upcycled gifts are getting better and cooler with each year that passes. Homemade presents are perfect for those with a small purse this Christmas. But if you’re not arty and craft-y and can’t think of anyone who wants an egg box covered in dried pasta then the web is crammed with sites great, green gadgets, fantastic, environmentally-friendly fashion and cool, carbon neutral Christmas presents such as Ethical Community, Nigel's Eco-store and Upxchange, to name a few.

Green Thing has rescued and united Britain’s lost gloves into perfect pairs for only £5 and Saved your unloved t-shirts from being forgotten about under the bed into a green fashion statement for £20.

Do you go for a real tree or a fake tree? How about a cardboard tree? How about any one of these 5 amazingly green trees? With some simple recycling and paper folding skills you can make some beautiful decorations. CD’s, sweet wrappers, homemade sweets and chocolate treats and Christmas cards from previous Christmas’s all make fantastic tree decorations.

Ah, now for the wrapping paper. Depending on your level of excitement you either carefully unwrap your presents and reuse the paper for next year (My Gran’s Tip: iron the paper to look just like new) or if you’re just too eager to see what’s inside and you rip it open. Small shreds of paper are perfect for composting and recycling (and bigger bits can be saved for next year’s smaller presents, ironed of course). You might even have wrapped your presents the Japanese way using Furoshiki (wrapping with cloth that gets reused every year).

Your compost bin is likely to get a lot of usage on Christmas day with all the vegetable peelings from Christmas dinner. Not to mention the paper hats, napkins and crackers (including cracker joke but not plastic keyring of Santa). If you’re unsure of what can be composted then take a peak at Recycle Now for handy hints.

Christmas dinner is the biggest waste provider of Christmas. Controlling portion sizes can be tricky enough normally but when it comes to cooking the biggest dinner of the year for all the family, it can be pretty difficult. Luckily the clever people at Love Food Hate Waste have come up with a handy Christmas portion calculator. Simply select the food you want and how many you are cooking for and hey presto, the portion sizes pop up on screen. But let’s presume that as well as having leftovers for the obliquity turkey (or Tofurkey) sandwiches on Boxing Day, you end up with more uneaten food than you had hoped. The Love Food Hate Waste folks have more helpful suggestions – leftover food recipes. And if that wasn’t making your life easy enough, you can pick what foods you have leftover and it will produce a recipe to suit your personal food needs!

So this year, have a very, merry, all-consuming Christmas!

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(Credit: Monica)

Core77, an online community of creatives, has just finished their latest challenge, "Sustainable Refrainables" a poster competition. The brief was for people to "create a poster that communicates the phrases that help designers move people toward sustainable design and business solutions".

There are some really good, clever and creative designs in the competition. Here's a small sample of the finalists, awaiting the winning results.

(Credits: Fabio Furlanis, Ivo Arzenton, Francesca Lorenzon)

(Credits: Giuseppe (gip) Casuccio)

(Credits: JHP)

To see more, visit Sustainable Refrainables.

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Artist David Stark decided to take the huge amount of cardboard waste produced from the opening of a friend’s retail store and design it into something fantastic.

A collection of cardboard furniture and home accessories was fashioned from the disused packaging ranging from a 10ft lamp to laser cut clocks. Old catalogues were shredded and reused and recreated into a comfy looking armchair and large topiary plant.

My personal favourites are the simple but stylish vases (yes, they wouldn’t be particularly practical I admit) and the huge and very realistic cacti – minus the sharp bits.

Next time you’re feeling creative, have a rummage through your recycling bin (be careful of the opened tins) and see what you can make.

For more cardboard creativity visit: David Stark Sketchbook.

Ps- At Green Thing we've got a particular fondness for creativity from cardboard, particularly for a purpose. Have a look at our Future Tents project, another example of using cardboard to create something sustainable and fantastic.

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Yiuco is a web-based service - the first of its kind- that lets people sell things so long as they are recycled, reused, upcycled or remanufactered. People are also able to share their ideas for reuse and recycled objects.

Yiuco offers a space for creators, inventors and entrepreneurs to run their own online shops. It's like eBay meets Etsy but everything listed has to have had a previous life. Yiuco, the Greek word for piled up clothes, aims "to create, design and think of new longer life-lasting products that will be more easily recycled and be used again instead of ending up as waste."

The name is a bit amorphous as the service doesn't just handle clothes. Yiuco has a wide range of categories from baby to movies and music to electronics. Items listed on the site include tin can creations, jenga block keychains and bowls made from old vinyl.

Since the service is so new and still being populating by new buyers and sellers, there are no transaction or listing fees until spring of this year.

For some more all-consuming inspiration, check out the Upxchange and this video on how to repurpose plastic.

(Spotted on Springwise)

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This is the story of a plastic bag, trying to come to grips with his immortaility. On a quest to meet his maker, the plastic bag travels great distances to understand his purpose in life.

It is a little long, so if you don't have time to watch all of it now, find time on the weekend. It's well worth it.

Voiced by Werner Herzog, and directed by Ramin Bahrani, this is a compellingly told story. It's much more than just a story about the lifecycle of a plastic bag, it's a moving narrative told in a unique and creative way. You'll start empathising with an inanimate object.

Ps- For more inspiration on kicking the plastic bag habit, check out one way to upcycle plastic bags and the Bag Bubble, another haven for plastic bags that is not the Pacific garbage patch.

(Spotted on PSFK)

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