We’ve talked about holiday cards, holiday lights, Christmas trees and wrapping already. If you have implemented some of these tips, you may not have a giant mess to clean up! But just in case, here are some suggestions.

• Compost your real tree and reuse your artificial tree.



• Recycle or reuse your holiday cards and gift wrap.
• Use rechargeable batteries instead of regular ones. I know that they can be problematic at times – if you don’t charge them right before using them, they can slowly lose their charge and not work when you need them. Plan ahead!
• For regular batteries, please recycle them instead of letting them end up in the landfill. You can find info on how and where to recycle at earth911.com.
• Did you get a new computer or other electronic equipment? Donate your old stuff! Our Central Texas Goodwill has a great program where they take all electronic equipment and try to reuse it first…if they can’t, they recycle it. Who does this in your city? This sounds like a really good resource: http://www.computerswithcauses.org/



• How many of you got new phones? I am soooo excited about a new cell phone recycling program called Turn Phones into Loans. This campaign is collecting one million cell phones to benefit the Chiapas project that will support 100,000 women by offering them microcredit loans. Simply visit their website, and they will send you a baggie that you drop your phone in and send it back to them at no cost to you! At our global headquarters, we’re partnering with them to put out collection bins. If you work for a large business, maybe you want to do it too!
• Did you get a gift card? After you use it, don’t throw it away. Bring it to any Whole Foods Market and we will recycle it for you! (Learn about our recycled gift cards.)

And one more thing… did you get something you don’t like? Why not donate it or re-gift it, instead of making that trip back to the store and spending more of your hard-earned cash?

Okay, I know you all have green ideas too. What other suggestions do you have to help us all clean up the after holiday mess?

How are you doing with all of our green holiday tips so far? We’ve covered “Zero Waste Holidays” tips on holiday cards, holiday lights, pre-cycling and Christmas trees. North Americans produce 25% more waste during the winter holidays – that’s 25 million extra tons of garbage going to the landfill. The Whole Foods Market Green Mission Team has gathered our favorite tips to feature on this blog throughout the holidays to help us all reduce our load. Our customers are some of the greenest folks around, so please share your tips with us too. Hopefully we’ll help each other discover new and creative ways to live lighter on the planet this holiday season.

Gift Wrap
If you’ve ever seen a typical living room on Christmas morning, you already know that gift wrap is a HUGE issue for greening our holidays. We’ve heard that if every family in America reused just two feet of holiday ribbon, we’d have 38,000 miles – enough to tie a bow around the planet. Wouldn’t that be a nice gift?

• Reuseable gift bags are perfect for eliminating waste.
• Better yet, use A Better Bag – it’s sturdy and can be reused over and over and over again. We have smaller ones for 79 cents and the large ones are 99 cents. A great deal for reusable gift wrap that doubles as a present!
• Decorate an unwrapped gift with reused ribbons and bows or dried grasses and flowers.
• Use a pretty dish towel, an old scarf, fabric scraps or a bed sheet to wrap gifts of all sizes.
• Use old calendar photos to wrap smaller gifts.
• If you do buy wrapping paper, make sure it’s made from post-consumer recycled paper and is non-metallic. Less ink and non-shiny surfaces make it easier to recycle.
• Use string, ribbon or wool for wrapping gifts rather than sticky tape. The string and paper can then be reused.
• Shipping a fragile gift? Instead of Styrofoam packing peanuts, use unbuttered popcorn. Got peanuts with your present this year? Drop off clean Styrofoam peanuts and bubble wrap for reuse at mailing companies.

Now, it’s your turn. What green gift wrap tricks do you have up your sleeve?

The holidays are a time of joy and celebration, of getting together with family and friends and sharing the gifts of the season. This is also the most wasteful time of the year. In fact, North Americans produce 25% more waste during this time of year than any other, which equates to 25 million extra tons of garbage going to the landfill. The Whole Foods Market Green Mission Team has gathered our favorite tips to feature on this blog throughout the holidays to help us all reduce our load. We know our customers are some of the greenest folks around, so please share your tips with us too. Hopefully we’ll help each other discover new and creative ways to live lighter on the planet this holiday season.

Precycling

From Wikipedia: “Precycling is the practice of reducing waste by attempting to avoid bringing into the home or business items which will generate waste.” Good luck with THAT this time of year, right?! Well, let’s break it down even more.

According to Jim McConnell, Whole Foods Market supply specialist who works in our Rocky Mountain region, “Precycling relates to what one can do to eliminate waste or prevent using a ‘disposable’ item prior to using it. An example would be to drink water from a reusable bottle, rather than buy water in a plastic bottle-even if the bottle is recyclable. This saves unsustainable resources from being used to create the bottle; and it saves the resources needed to recycle it.”

We’ve already talked about cards, lights, and trees…if you apply the concept of precycling to gift tags, for example, this would be reusing holiday cards that you have already received as gift tags instead of buying them. Gift wrap is easy to precycle – we are going to talk about that in our next post though, so stay tuned.

A good way to precycle is to look at the packaging of the gift you are about to buy. Is it reusable, or is it wrapped in plastic that will end up in the landfill? Or does the manufacturer care about the environment and it’s wrapped in cardboard, or in something you can reuse, or better yet, not packaged at all? If you can get out and shop for gifts at a local store, you can avoid ordering gifts online that typically get shipped in boxes with Styrofoam peanuts that will just end up in your garage until the end of time.

For all of you out there who want to learn more about precycling, here’s a great book that I highly recommend: Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. These guys take this to a whole new level.

Says my friend Lee Kane, Whole Foods Market’s North Atlantic Regional Green Mission Specialist:
“In cradle to cradle terms, the answer is one of design; if everything was ultimately designed to become technical or biological nutrients at ‘end-of-life’ there would be no ‘waste’ to contend with.”

What are you going to precycle this holiday season?

Before you start “partying,” check out our previous Zero Waste Holidays tips on holiday cards, holiday lights, and Christmas trees. North Americans produce 25% more waste during the winter holidays – that’s 25 million extra tons of garbage going to the landfill. The Whole Foods Market Green Mission Team has gathered our favorite tips to feature on this blog throughout the holidays to help us all reduce our load. Our customers are some of the greenest folks around, so please share your tips with us too. Hopefully we’ll help each other discover new and creative ways to live lighter on the planet this holiday season.

Holiday Parties
At least 28 billion pounds of edible food are sent to the landfill each year. That’s simply criminal, folks. Green those holiday parties and make them zero waste in more ways than one! Don’t forget, set a good example for your guests and they may take some of your green ideas home with them.

• Send e-cards instead of paper invitations.
• Rent dishes or glassware to avoid using disposables.
• Or, go with compostable disposables.
• Cook with natural and organic ingredients and support local farmers and food artisans. Spread the word to your guests and don’t be shy about telling them how you did it!
• Turn down the heat before the guests arrive. The extra body heat will heat the room while you save energy.
• Recycle and compost everything you can! Set up recycling bins for bottles and cans. If composting is available in your area, put out a bin for compostables too!
• Walk, carpool or take the bus to neighborhood parties.
• Keep an eye on the buffet table and make sure nothing sits out longer than two hours – you don’t want to throw out food that’s no longer safe to eat.
• Pack leftovers to go for your guests. You can start a trend! Make sure no food goes to waste.

Now, it’s your turn. What are you doing to make your holiday parties and gatherings as green as can be?

We’re on a roll now with our “Zero Waste Holidays” blog posts. (Read about greening holiday cards and holiday lights.) North Americans produce 25% more waste during the winter holidays – that’s 25 million extra tons of garbage going to the landfill. The Whole Foods Market Green Mission Team has gathered our favorite tips to feature on this blog throughout the holidays to help us all reduce our load. Our customers are some of the greenest folks around, so please share your tips with us too. Hopefully we’ll help each other discover new and creative ways to live lighter on the planet this holiday season.

Christmas Trees

More than 50 million trees are sold each Christmas and it’s estimated that 30 million of those end up in our landfills. Yikes! How to help:

• Buy a real, cut tree from a sustainable source. Go local if available.
• Avoid trees sprayed with chemical preservatives to protect indoor air quality.
• After the holiday, have your tree mulched into wood shavings for use in local parks and forests. Many communities offer drop-off or collection service.
• Avoid flocked or spray painted trees and don’t decorate with tinsel since these cannot be ground for mulch.
• Choose a live, potted tree with its roots still attached from an ecologically sustainable source and plant it in your yard after Christmas.
• If planting a live tree after the holidays, dig your hole for the tree before the ground freezes. Fill the hole with leaves and cover it. Then after the holidays, you simply rake out the leaves and place the balled tree into the hole. Back fill it with compost. It will do fine until the springtime when you can add water and any other necessary soil amendments.
• Avoid artificial trees that are made from polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a particularly toxic plastic, and these trees are typically not recyclable.

Now it’s your turn. What green tricks do you have up your sleeve for a green tree?

Thanks for joining me for our second “Zero Waste Holidays” blog post. (Check out our inaugural post on holiday cards.) North Americans produce 25% more waste during the winter holidays, which equates to 25 million extra tons of garbage going to the landfill. The Whole Foods Market Green Mission Team has gathered our favorite tips to feature on this blog throughout the holidays to help us all reduce our load. Our customers are some of the greenest folks around, so please share your tips with us too. Hopefully we’ll help each other discover new and creative ways to live lighter on the planet this holiday season.

Holiday Lights
Yes, we know that lights are festive, but you can find ways to save money and energy while turning on the twinkle.

• Trade in your conventional strands of lights for energy efficient solar or LED lights – 90% more energy efficient and they last longer.
• Don’t risk falling asleep without turning out the lights – use an appliance timer to turn lights off at the end of the evening.
• Place lights in strategic locations instead of all over everywhere. You can reduce by using just a few strands.
• Turn your lights off just a little earlier than you did last year.
• Recycle old strands of lights by removing and discarding old bulbs and recycling the strand as scrap metal.
• Companies like HolidayLEDs.com will not only recycle your lights for you, they will also give you 15% off your order of anything on their website when you send them lights to recycle. I like their suggestion of coordinating with your friends and neighbors to collect old lights to send to them for recycling.
• Check out Earth911.com to see if there is a holiday lights recycling facility near you.

Now, it’s your turn. What are you doing to cut the energy cost on holiday lights this year?

Holiday Cards
Did you know that over 2 ½ billion (with a B!) holiday cards are sold annually in the U.S.? That’s enough to fill a 10 story building the size of a football field. And what happens to most of those cards? That’s right, into the landfill. Some ideas on what to do instead:

• Send e-cards instead of paper cards. If you feel this makes you look cheap or lazy, add a line about your efforts to curb waste. Who can argue with that?
• If you do send paper cards, make sure they’re printed on post-consumer recycled paper and choose non-metallic cards so they can be recycled (cards embossed with foil and envelopes with a foil insert are not recyclable).
• Reuse the greeting cards you receive as gift tags. You’re probably not planning to re-read every single card you receive this holiday. Grab some scissors and get crafty.
• Remove the fronts of your cards and send to St. Jude’s Ranch for Children Recycled Card program.

Now, it’s your turn. How do you green your holiday cards? And if you send e-cards, how do you get Aunt Madge’s email address without having to call and talk to her for an hour?

If you think like I do, when you need to replace appliances and other household items you go for the most environmentally-friendly choices out there, like Energy Star® certified models and water-saving appliances such as tankless water heaters and front-loading washing machines. I’m fortunate to live in Austin where the city offers rebates on appliances like these, so not only can you save money in energy and water consumption costs, but you can get a hefty rebate. I got $100 back from the City of Austin when I bought my front-loader washing machine a few years ago, which is no small change!

But alas, my relationship with my beloved 6-year-old front-loader came to an abrupt halt last month when it started making a REALLY LOUD banging noise during the spin cycle. The repair man asked me questions like: “You used ‘HE’ soap, right?” and “How much soap did you use?” I quickly realized that I had not done enough research. I swear I read the manual but, as it turns out, it was going to cost more to repair my washing machine than to buy a new one. Ouch!

Hence, the reason for this post. If I didn’t know that you should only use “HE” (high efficiency) soap, maybe there are others out there who don’t know! And also, even though I always use eco-friendly soap like Seventh Gen or Ecover which are “HE” soaps (it says so on the label), I apparently used too much and created excessive suds that washed away the grease in the bearings and completely ruined my washing machine.

Since this happened I have talked to many others who did not know this, so let me offer some advice to help you save your washing machine! Only use HE soaps, and follow the manufacturer’s recommendations to figure out how much soap to use. The Soap and Detergent Association (who knew?) has created a very informative PDF that I now highly recommend everyone check out.

Have you discovered some little known hazard while greening your life? Please share your knowledge to help others avoid the same issues by posting a comment below. Thanks!

At WFM, we just happen to celebrate Team Member Appreciation Week during the same week as Earth Day, so at the Global office, it always turns into a great party. This year we enjoyed perfect Texas weather on the Plaza, complete with live music from Colin Gilmore, seed planting, face painting, cake and gelato eating….we held a trash art contest, played “Pin the Continent on Mother Earth” (in which Team Members donned a bandana, were twirled around a few times, and tried to pin all the continents to the correct geographical location on the map, ha!) and “Wheel of Waste” (in which Team Members spun the wheel and determined whether the selected item should be recycled, reused, composted, or thrown away). It was super FUN!

But I saved the best for last…for the second year in a row we held a voluntary pledge in honor of Earth Day. Last year, we had over 100 Team Members pledge to take the stairs, conserve energy, carpool, bring their own water bottles, etc.-in general, they pledged to become more conscious of the simple, daily things they could do to help the earth.

This year, we asked Team Members to take it one step further and give up their trash cans! “Think Trash Last” was the theme. We asked them to take the following things into consideration:

• Can I reuse? …use a SIGG bottle, drink from a reusable coffee mug, bring your own silverware and containers – skip the plastic silverware, re-use bulk bin/produce bags and containers!
• Can I recycle? …recycle glass, aluminum, #1,2 (& soon #5) plastics, paper, cardboard, batteries, electronics, etc.
• Can I compost? …compost uneaten food, soiled napkins, soup & salad bar containers…even gum.
• Can I buy better? …make some changes in my purchases that will eliminate the trash that I am producing…less packaging!

And guess what?! 77 brave souls gave up their trash cans. They are now having to pile their trash on their desk, which will force them to want to reduce the amount they generate, which will force them to re-think what they are buying, which will eventually eliminate more and more waste going to the landfill. We are making Earth Day every day, that’s for sure.

Are you in the same boat as I am? I have a really old television because I just don’t really watch TV, and I don’t have cable, so it looks like I’ll be one of those folks who will benefit from a digital converter box to keep my perfectly good television working. The other choice is to invest in a new digital-ready television. If you aren’t up to speed on this whole thing, the digital switch is coming June 12th so find the details here.

The environmentally-friendly choice is obvious: opt for the converter box. Your television will still work! But if you DO choose to buy a new television, what are you going to do with your old one? Please don’t throw it away! Televisions are toxic. They contain lead, mercury and other stuff that we should not be putting in the landfill. There are PLENTY of alternatives:

• Post it on Freecycle.org
• Give it to Goodwill
• If it’s a Panasonic, Sharp or Toshiba, MRM will take it off your hands
• Check the EPA website for other recycling options
• Use the ecological side of your brain and get creative! Donate it to a local school or shelter, or encourage your favorite green volunteer organization to hold an e-waste recycling drive to be sure that this potential eco-disaster is minimized as much as possible. You can do this!

Then, when you go shopping for your new television:

• Pick one made by a company that has a take-back program, like Sony
• Make sure you get one with an Energy Star rating
• Get a power strip that you turn off when you are not using your entertainment system.

Any other suggestions? I know you greenies have lots of ideas to share!