The Clean and Green Club

Maybe not! The Christmas holiday causes millions of trees to be cut down before they are anywhere near their full carbon-sequestering potential. And then you have to factor in transporting them large distances on diesel trucks. Finally, many of these trees, now perhaps covered with tinsel, candle wax, bits of wrapping paper, and other non-recyclable trash, are thrown in landfills.

So, as a society, we have some work to do. Fortunately, this industry is really easy to make as eco-green as its iconic product’s color. All we need is to change the way we think and act. We have to start thinking of Christmas trees as a crucial part in an international reforestation campaign that would be one of the most effective things we could do to sequester carbon and reverse catastrophic climate change.

Here’s how I would reinvent this industry:

First, grow the trees in pots. No need to cut them for harvesting. Simply pick up the pot and bring it to the resale point. Farmers could even run their operations like pick-your-own apple orchards.

Second, part of the purchase deal is that the farmer or retailer takes back the potted tree after the holiday. The farmers and retailers partner with local highway and parks departments as well as apartment complexes, landscape architecture companies, college campuses, hospitals, and other institutions, to find new permanent homes for these trees and get paid again for their work. Each year, millions of new evergreens would join the existing tree canopy. Maybe they even collect and unweave the wreaths too, and use them as indoor air fresheners, then compost them.

Third, we shift our decorations either to reusable metal, glass, and ceramic ornaments that get removed from the tree and packed away for next year, or to all-natural materials such as cranberry necklaces, pine cones, and colored leaves. Pretty as they are, we leave the tinsel strips off the trees. They could be very nice decorations on corkboards, though.

And if we start this journey now, we could have a very much more eco-friendly holiday season as soon as 2020.

Full disclosure: I am speaking as an outsider. While I enjoy attending friends’ and neighbors’ Christmas celebrations, I am a Jew and we do not have a Christmas tree in our house.

When I sent this article to my Virtual Assistant, Jeannette Tibbetts, to set up this newsletter, she was excited enough to send these comments (used with her permission). I consider her a co-author of this piece, and am pleased to share her insights with you, since she IS a Christmas insider.

I loved your main article…I’ve always thought about the ridiculous practice of trucking so many trees to areas where there are so many trees!

One idea is: BUY LOCAL…there are many tree farms in our area in Western Massachusetts; you go for a lovely walk and pick out your tree, so it’s cut down specifically for you. No thousands of trees left to die in those disgusting parking lot tree shops.

I’ve always wanted a live Christmas tree but the problem with potted trees is they cannot stay in the house for very long (i.e., only a couple of days); they dry out too much and will die. Also, you must dig a huge hole before the ground freezes so you can plant it right away. But it is definitely a great idea with some planning.

One more thing–discarding the tree: ALL cities/towns should collect trees to turn into mulch. It’s a logical and helpful solution for everyone!

You wouldn’t expect a book on consumer and industrial package to be fascinating, but this one certainly fascinated me (your mileage may vary). Packaging is its doorway to explore the entire state of sustainability in business
Compiled by Tom Szaky, founder and CEO of the amazing company TerraCycle—which has found ways to turn such items as cigarette butts and foil/plastic chip bags into usable raw materials—this book held my interest in surprising ways.

First, there was the meta-level: an anthology that isn’t so much discrete articles as a coherent, collaborative whole. Many chapters draw on the previous ones and hint at the content to follow. And those authors include C-level and senior management at Unilever, Procter & Gamble (two of the largest consumer packaged goods conglomerates in the world), and SUEZ (a major global player in waste management), as well as equally heavy hitters in thinktanks and government (from the World Economic Forum to the former head of the EPA).

Then, of course, the rich and informative content; I took six pages of notes! I learned a lot about how products are recycled, what some of the issues are, why careless “recycling” by well-intentioned consumers trying to recycle more does the opposite of what they think and consigns huge quantities of material to the landfill; the whole batch is considered contaminated. And finally an answer to something that I’d wondered about for years—WHY black plastic isn’t recyclable: because the optical scanners recycling facilities use to separate the waste stream can’t read the number indicating what type of plastic it is, and different kinds of plastic shouldn’t be mixed (p. 100). The inability to recycle black, often extremely durable material that should be able to be repurposed, has always bothered me.

And I also learned some things about how to think about packaging from an end-of-life perspective, and how to incorporate those insights at the design phase—so right from the start, packages can be designed to be easily collected, reused, and/or recycled (pp. 85-87, among other sections).

Ultimately, pretty much anything can be recycled, even used disposable diapers and menstrual pads (p. 72). But what we recycle depends on what end products we can sell profitably. And that has to do both with whether recyclers can find or create ready markets and with how much energy, how many processes, and at what cost to process the waste into something recyclable. And that makes me wonder: Is it really worth doing something like P&G’s project collecting beach plastic, running it through a dozen or more processes, and surrounding it with layers of virgin plastic in order to make a shampoo bottle (pp. 228-237)—or are the energy and infrastructure costs and the product compromises too great; is it really just greenwashing for a significant PR benefit?

It’s encouraging to see how much progress our biggest corporations have made and how creatively they’ve sought profit opportunities from thinking differently about packaging and waste. As an example, Unilever’s zero-waste strategy saves $234 million a year and created 1000 new jobs (pp. 171-172). But I had many questions; here are a few:

• If the issue with black plastic is optical, couldn’t there be a work-around, such as human sorting or a different type of sorting machine that tests through electronic analysis of the chemical structure?
• Rather than doing something like P&G’s beach plastic project, would it perhaps make more sense to develop enzymes that can digest plastics, and figure out a way to use the digested residue?
• Why do we lose usability with every recycling iteration, when nature has true self-sustaining closed loops?

Despite these questions, this book is a crucial addition to the green business bookshelf, and is likely to make a positive impact on designers, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers for many years. But read Cradle to Cradle first so you’re not coming to this in a vacuum (see my review here –scroll down to the bottom article).

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good–creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.