5 tips to make your holidays more environmentally friendly

Celebrating the holidays can mean lots of shiny plastic ribbons, colorful wrapping paper and twinkling string lights.

For those concerned about their environmental footprint, fear not.

We have environmentally friendly alternatives and tips to spread holiday cheer while being mindful of the planet.

New gifts don’t have to be new to the world.

The consumer advocacy group MASSPIRG recommends buying refurbished electronics as holiday gifts to lower your environmental footprint. The group notes that purchasing a refurbished smartphone decreases the environmental impact of the device by 77% to 91%. (It may also be easier on your wallet!) Here are some other tips from the organization on finding quality products.

Beyond electronics, you can also visit thrift and consignment stores for gently used clothing, books, toys and more. The items are often less expensive and leave a much smaller environmental impact.

If every consumer purchased one secondhand garment instead of a new one in a year, it would be the equivalent of taking 76 million cars off the road for a day, according to a 2023 report from online consignment shop Thred UP.

Check out our tips on where to go thrifting in WBUR's Field Guide to Boston.

This tip is pretty simple, but often gets overlooked.

You don’t need to buy new wrapping paper to make your packaging aesthetically pleasing. Consider using old newspaper, paper bags from the grocery store, colorful magazines or reuse wrapping paper from previous years.

Test out your artistic skills and create a collage, draw or paint holiday figures like snowflakes or candy canes on the reused paper. Your loved ones will think it’s sweet you put in extra effort to personalize their packages.

After cooking your holiday recipes, you may have leftover ingredients you don't know what to do with. Instead of letting them go bad, turn them into another delicious dish.

Food Waste Feast helps reduce food waste through innovative recipes. The website, run by local sisters Mei and Irene Li, provides tips for storing ingredients from herbs to legumes and offers recipe ideas. So if you have extra potatoes that were never mashed or fresh basil sitting on the counter, you’ll find plenty of ideas for meals to throw them into.

WBUR's Andrea Shea and Lisa Creamer spoke with Irene Li previously about how to use every last bit of food. She suggested choosing recipes that share ingredients, not buying outside of your shopping list and more. Read her other tips here.

Are you feeling guilty about throwing away a Christmas tree at the end of the season? You probably don’t have to.

The Nature Conservancy reports that real trees are much better for the environment than fake ones. Artificial trees cannot be recycled and often wind up in landfills whereas real trees actually support the environment. Tree farms only harvest 30 million of the 350 to 500 million trees growing on farms across the U.S., leaving plenty of forest habitat for wildlife. When people purchase Christmas trees, they keep the farms in business, allowing the forests to thrive.

Most towns in Massachusetts offer recycling programs for the Christmas trees to be chipped and composted, or used as mulch. For specifics on your town’s program, check here.

Before you recycle your tree, remember to remove all tinsel, ornaments and lights.

You can recycle much more than just your Christmas tree. Beyond the Bin, a program run by the state's Department of Environmental Protection, can help you find the nearest locations for recycling all kinds of items — and even search by the radius you're willing to travel. Beyond the Bin covers recyclable items from string lights to bicycles.

Pro tip: This database is great for recycling those gifts of holidays past that have seen better days.