An inconvenient holiday

from Toronto Star, Tuesday Dec. 19

The holidays are expensive. Least of all for those who celebrate them.

The real loser of the season is the Earth.

We decorate our homes with shiny plastic and dying plants. We string lights across our homes and keep them running late into the night. We travel home for the holidays. Though many of us sigh over the piles of packaging left on the floor come Christmas morning, we know that we have spent a holiday revelling in excess.

For example, Ontarians throw away almost a million extra tonnes of trash during the season. If we’re good, much of our waste gets recycled. If we’re not, it gets trashed or burned. Every year, our desire for family and tradition leaves a massive ecological footprint.

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Away in a trash bin

Envision Christmas morning, after all the hullabaloo, the pretty wrapping paper and bubble wrap and Scotch tape sitting in the middle of the living room.

According to the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, Ontarians throw away 900,000 extra tonnes of garbage during the holidays, including 288 million Christmas cards and 23 square kilometres of wrapping paper – enough to cover 3,000 football fields. We throw away 900 tonnes of aluminium foil and about 35,000 tonnes of plastic packaging.

“Especially around Christmas time, it’s a good chance to reflect on our environmental impact. It goes beyond just our families, but also future generations,” says Kerry Bowman, an ethicist who teaches environmental studies at the University of Toronto.

Cheap decorations and toys, which tend to come from the Far East, have a greater impact on the environment because we’re more likely to throw them out when we’re done with them, he says.

Also, “when you’re calculating your ecological footprint, it’s greater because that stuff has to be shipped … It’s in the true spirit of the season to consider these things.”

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Hark the herald shopkeepers sing

The malls are pretty for a reason. The constant carols, the lights, the bows and Christmas trees are designed to awaken a latent shopping response.

The holidays are a time to increase our spending on stuff we don’t really need. Every item being hawked in the mall was shipped via truck, plane or train, releasing more pollution into the air. Transportation of these goods releases emissions that cause what scientists have dubbed the greenhouse effect. Just as glass traps heat from sunlight in a room, pollutants in the upper atmosphere act as a barrier, trapping in warmth. This effect causes the Earth to become warmer, which leads to global warming, climate change and the melting of the polar ice caps.

Canadians are expecting to blow about $861 each on holiday shopping this year. The season triples the sales of toys, games, hobbies, jewellery, luggage and leather goods. See the increased use of plastic, cardboard, leather, ore extraction and smelting.

“Obviously the focus is on children and how we all want them to have the best Christmas ever. But it’s also time to think about the environmental legacy you’re leaving them,” says Laurel Broten, Ontario’s environment minister. “The holidays are a great time for us to look at our actions … and to look at how much packaging we use.”

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Three imported wines, two dead trees and a non-organic giant turkey

Oh, the smells of the season: Pine and sugar and a house thick with scent of turkey and stuffing. Much of the holidays are devoted to things whose sole purpose is to be killed, eaten or displayed and then recycled or thrown out. For example, what would Christmas be without that sacred holiday tradition of hacking down a living conifer and dressing it up in light-reflecting tinsel and electricity-consuming incandescents? According to the 2001 Census of Agriculture, almost 40,000 hectares of land are used to grow Christmas trees.

Generally speaking, growing the trees is beneficial to the environment. But according to the Toronto Green Community, a grassroots environmental group, tree farmers often use fertilizers and pesticides. Not to mention cutting down the trees and transporting them releases carbon into the air.

Ontarians alone toss out about one million Christmas trees a year, according to the environment ministry. Oh, and then there’s the turkey. Canadians will spend roughly $6 billion on food this month, which is a little higher than our normal monthly shopping spree.

And in these winter months, we especially like our turkey. In 2005, we ate 9.6 million whole turkeys. Two-thirds of those were consumed during the last three months of the year – Christmas and Thanksgiving. Each person is responsible for the consumption of 4.3 kilograms of turkey last year.

With help from the Canadian Standards Association, the Star compared carbon emissions on holiday meals last year. Depending on whether your holiday feast relied on locally grown foods, or imported goods, it may have caused between 400 grams and 15 kilograms of greenhouse gases to be released due to shipping and transportation.

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I’ll be home for Christmas – via jumbo jet

Finally, an excuse to visit those relatives by teleconference. Commercial flights are responsible for an incredible amount of carbon pollution.

Environmentalists, like those who work at Zero Footprint, a Toronto-based environmental group, calculate one’s carbon dioxide footprint as follows: One person is responsible for 0.00034 metric tonnes of CO2 per kilometre of a medium-range flight. Longer flights of more than 1,600 kilometres tend to be more fuel efficient, releasing 0.0003 tonnes per person per kilometre.

That means a person travelling on a one-way trip to Vancouver from Toronto – a flight covering almost 3,400 kilometres – is responsible for approximately 1 tonne of carbon dioxide released into the air.

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“(Flights) are the fastest growing source of carbon dioxide emissions,” says Nick Garrison, director of communications for Zero Footprint. It’s gaining on electricity generation, the leading cause of carbon dioxide emissions. “Also, emissions released into the upper atmosphere have a greater impact than emissions released from the ground.”

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Rudolph’s shiny nose won’t light up our power-hungry homes

Heat, Christmas lights, ovens: Last December, Ontario consumed 13,745,880 mega-watt hours of electricity – about one million more MWh than in November.

Most of our power, 36 per cent, is derived by splitting atoms in nuclear power plants, a power source that leaves radioactive waste for generations to come. A further quarter of our power comes from damming lakes and rivers. The rest is produced by burning oil, gas and coal, which releases pollutants like carbon dioxide into the air.

But with green-friendly options like power-saving LED Christmas lights and Grandma’s hand-knit sweaters, we’re better behaved in December than during the summer. Then the need for constant air conditioning can drive Ontarians to use even more power. In August 2006, for instance, total monthly demand hit 14,450,962 MWh.

Though looking through these stats makes for grim holiday reading, it’s worth remembering that in many pollution-causing categories we actually waste more during the summer months.

Comforting.

With files from the Toronto Star Library