Have yourself a waste-free Christmas

• Consumer goods and food clock up nearly half of all global greenhouse gas emissions so how can you have a waste-free, circular Christmas with all the trimmings?
• Seasonal advice on being green at Christmas and the age-old debate: real versus artificial tree.

At WRAP, we want Circular Living* to become the norm in every boardroom and every home and believe Christmas is the perfect time to show the environment some love too. With our campaigns Recycle Now & Love Food Hate Waste we have produced some special festive tips for having a more circular Christmas that cuts out waste and reduces emissions from what we buy and eat. 

Harriet Lamb, WRAP CEO says: “Christmas is the perfect time to show the environment some love. To help make Circular Living* become the norm in every home, we can all learn from our nans – shop like your nan, cook like your nan, fold up and keep wrapping paper for next year – that generation never wasted anything. They made soups from leftovers, sewed on new buttons, bought just what they needed and made things last. These are valuable lessons to help us all have festive fun while caring for the environment’.

Recycle Now

Recycle Now has an invaluable tool on their website, the Recycling Locator. This enables you to find out exactly what you can and cannot recycle in your area. By entering your postcode, you can tell if your tree can be collected by your local authority, and you can pop your plastic bags and wrapping together and check which supermarket locally these can be taken to for recycling.

Top tips for recycling this Christmas:

• It’s not what it’s wrapped in but what’s inside that counts so why not re-use wrapping paper? To be able to recycle it’s best to buy plain paper and avoid any covered in glitter or foil. Also, don’t forget the wrapping paper scrunch test to see if you can recycle it. Scrunch it into a ball - if it springs back, it contains plastic and can’t be recycled. If it stays as a ball – recycle it. Christmas cards covered in glitter are also NOT recyclable. Try to remove ribbons, bows, batteries, and other adornments before recycling. 
• So, which is better – artificial or a natural tree? If you buy a tree that still has its roots attached, you can plant it out in the garden so that you can enjoy it throughout the year as well as for future Christmases. If you don’t have space for it, or if you’ve bought a cut tree that no longer has its roots, your local council is likely to have a collection point or may even pick up your tree from your home in the New Year (check your local council’s website) and can be recycled into wood chips or shredded and composted. An artificial tree can’t be recycled, but it can be reused! They last for years which helps minimise their carbon footprint and if you want to trade in for a pricier model, charities will often take artificial trees if they’re in good condition. 
• Fairy lights can be recycled with small electricals at Recycling Centres. Some local authorities collect small electricals as part of their recycling collections and may also provide collection bins at other sites too, for example at supermarkets.
• Flatten cardboard boxes to make more room in your recycling bin, bag or box. 
• Empty, rinse and squash plastic bottles and pop the lid back on. 
• You can now buy recyclable Christmas crackers; to avoid single use plastic gifts. Crackers covered in glitter cannot be recycled.

Christmas dinner 

WRAP’s latest research shows that annual food waste costs a four-person household in the UK around £1,000 per year in food bought but not eaten. More than 6 million tonnes of food and drink was thrown away at home during 2021, and of this around a whopping 5 million tonnes could have been eaten.

Potatoes, cooked leftovers (homemade/pre-prepared meals), and bread top the UK’s wasted food table. UK households throw away 300,000t of meat and fish a year, costing £3.2 billion.

It is easy to go overboard when doing the Christmas food shop but here are Love Food Hate Waste’s top tips for preventing food waste this Christmas:

Turkey

Poultry is seventh in the top 10 most wasted foods in the UK.

The main reason for poultry waste is ‘prepared, cooked, served too much’ and most of the waste is made up from meat from whole birds. Most poultry waste is chicken but at Christmas it’s all about turkey, and the problem is the same. So, it’s important to use up those leftovers.

Any kind of leftovers (apart from rice, which is strictly one day) can be stored in the fridge for up to two days. The chances are there’s going to be a lot more left over from a Christmas turkey than from a usual Sunday roast, so freezing leftover cooked meat is useful – and perfectly safe. If you’re going to freeze your leftover cooked turkey, it should be done as soon as possible.

Whether cooked from frozen or fresh, you can use the leftovers to make a new meal, for example, a curry, which can then be frozen.

There are only two safe ways to defrost raw or cooked meat/poultry: in the fridge or using the microwave on the defrost setting directly before cooking/re-heating.

The rule to remember is to only re-heat once.

Both Love Food Hate Waste and the Food Standards Agency have some great advice about defrosting and cooking turkey and using up the leftovers in delicious dishes:

• Christmas food hygiene advice on Food Standards Agency website
• Poultry (e.g. chicken and turkey) | Love Food Hate Waste

Potatoes

The humble potato is the UK’s most wasted food in the UK.

Potatoes should be stored in the fridge (FSA advice). They can be parboiled and frozen to get ahead of the Christmas rush. It’s best to ‘open freeze’ on a tray and then transfer to an airtight container. This is so they don’t all stick together, and you can take out as many as you need when you come to roast them – straight from the freezer. Alternatively, you can buy frozen roasties, all ready to go.

Frozen veg - Brussel sprouts, cabbage, carrots

There are a few of options for veg. You can buy fresh, blanch and freeze or buy frozen.

Swapping highly wasted fresh foods for frozen options (’swaptions’) could help to reduce food waste, because it lasts for months and you can use as much as you need when you need it. Frozen vegetables can be cooked from frozen.

Check out our useful links on the Love Food Hate Waste website:

• The best recipes for Christmas leftovers
• Food portion calculator: your guide to perfect portion sizes

Check out our useful links on the Recycle Now website:

• Top Christmas Recycling Stats & Facts
• Five New Year’s recycling resolutions
• Eco-friendly Christmas: restive recycling tips
• Recycle right this Christmas