How to save money, reduce your waste as well as your impact on the planet this Christmas.

Are you dreaming of a green Christmas?

Christmas is a time of joy and celebration, but it’s also a season of excess, particularly when it comes to waste. The UK generates over three million tonnes of extra waste during the festive period, including wrapping paper, food waste, packaging and unwanted gifts. Here's how you can reduce your waste and recycle more effectively this Christmas:

• Wrapping paper - if this is coated or metallic it cannot be recycled. If it is just made of paper (e.g. brown paper) then it can be. Try the scrunch test – if the paper stays scrunched up then it’s likely to be paper and OK to recycle.  The UK uses 277,000 miles of wrapping paper each year that can’t be recycled.
• Christmas cards - The UK sends an estimated 1.05 billion Christmas cards each year, but an estimated 1 billion of them don’t get recycled. That's the equivalent of cutting down nearly 350,000 trees - or a forest roughly the size of Basing Wood - every year. Buy recycled or FSC-certified cards and avoid those with glitter or plastic as they can’t be recycled. (Forests have around 1,000 to 2,500 trees per hectare. Basing Wood is about 120 hectares in size. Even if it had 2,500 trees per hectare, that's 300,000 trees.)
• Real Christmas trees – if you pay for the borough council's garden waste pick up, you can leave these out with your recycling in early January. If not, there will be pick-up locations throughout the borough - to be confirmed nearer the time by the borough council. The trees get made into wood chippings and soil conditioner.
• Aluminium (foil from the turkey, from mince pies, foil takeaway containers, foil trays etc) please clean and put in the round yellow recycling bin in local recycling centres, or in main supermarkets.
• Christmas tree lights should be recycled when they no longer work. They can be recycled at the small electrical recycle bins, or at the county council's household waste and recycling centres sites.
• Empty perfume or aftershave bottles can be put in the green glass box.
• Food waste can be put in the new caddies, leave out each week on your collection day (remember to put the handle to the lock position). If the liner splits, you can double-bag it or use an old plastic bread bag or similar.

Sustainable festivities: how you can reduce your impact on the planet and save money this Christmas

Christmas is a time to celebrate with friends and family, and enjoy decorating trees, giving gifts and eating delicious food.

But Christmas can have a massive impact on the environment – over three million tonnes of waste for the UK, as well as costing the average family over £700.

The biggest driver (and cost) by far is buying presents: the average adult buying 20 gifts for family and friends would add the equivalent of 479 kilograms to their carbon footprint.

Nearly everything you buy has a cost in terms of carbon – where it was made, how it was shipped, how it’s wrapped. So, buying new stuff – for example clothes, toys, electronics – has a carbon footprint.

Electronic gifts have the highest carbon emissions, with tech such as laptops and games consoles making up around half of each person’s gift-related emissions. An option could be to purchase refurbished items at a fraction of the cost.

And the wrapping paper the UK uses each year is enough to wrap the island of Guernsey.  You could use brown paper instead – fully recyclable or reusable. You can jazz it up with reusable ribbons or other decorations.

In addition, Christmas is considered to be one of the most stressful holidays, as we are bombarded with media and advertising telling us to buy more presents, more food, more decorations. The pressure to buy everyone the perfect gift can be overwhelming, as well as very stressful and costly.

So, here are some ideas to help reduce the cost and stress of Christmas gift buying, as well as being kind to the planet:

• Buy second hand (e.g. eBay/Facebook, apps such as Vinted, charity shops).
• Have a monetary limit on presents for the family (e.g. no more than £10)
• Make a Christmas list so that people don’t buy you things you don’t want or need.
• Do a Secret Santa so everyone in the family gets one decent present.
• Make your own presents – such as homemade biscuits or chocolates, chutney, a knitted scarf, bath bombs, and so on. Each year, the UK throws away approximately £42 million of unwanted presents, most of which end up in landfill. If DIY is not for you, try gifting an experience or membership.
• Decide not to do presents at all – or just for the kids. For many of us we have everything we need already. The best gift we can give is a liveable planet

How to save money on food this Christmas

Christmas is by far the worst holiday for food waste: 45% of people say they overbuy during the festive season.  The most wasted food at Christmas is cheese, followed by chocolate, biscuits, vegetables, cream and turkey.

Tips to reduce your Christmas food waste:

• Clear the fridge before Christmas and plan your meals sensibly.
• Share any leftovers on Olio, an app that pairs you with neighbours who might need them – and supplies recipes to make best use of leftovers
• Make a list of what you’re cooking and stick to it
• Measure out your portions so you don’t cook too much food
• Have some empty containers handy to put uneaten food in – you can freeze them or keep in the fridge if you’ll eat them the next day. You can freeze most things – check out this handy guide. For example, you can freeze leftover wine in ice cube trays and can freeze leftover cheese too – ideal for cooking. And keep a loaf of sliced bread in the freezer – handy for toast and keeps it fresh. Don’t store bread in the fridge – it goes stale much more quickly.
• Re-purpose your leftovers – cold turkey with baked potato, turkey curry, brussels sprouts and stilton soup (yes really – it’s good!)
• Keep an eye of use-by dates – you can either eat the food that day or freeze it for another time.
• Check out the opening times of local shops – some are open on Christmas Eve and Boxing Day, so it’s not a problem if you’ve forgotten something. Also there’s less pressure to do a huge shop.
• Go meat-free (if not, go organic and free-range)

Having a plant-only diet is the best thing we can do to lower carbon emissions and it is easy with so many great vegan and vegetarian cookbooks around. Now could be the time to go the full (meat-free) hog. If that’s a step too far, try to buy local, try to buy organic and free-range. Here’s a guide to shopping organic on a shoestring.

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and a sustainable New Year.

Blog created by the Climate Change and Sustainability Team, Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council - November 2025