Food, travel, lighting, and gifts over three days of Christmas festivities can have a hefty carbon footprint. A typical consumer can end up hitting 5.5% of their total yearly emissions in this short period.
This last-minute gift guide will inspire more eco-friendly gifting choices as we approach the festive season.
Second hand goes a long way
The most sustainable Christmas gift is generally a second hand one. Durability goes hand in hand with product sustainability – it keeps products out of landfill and avoids the need for virgin natural resource extraction to replace disposed products.
Online marketplaces aggregate your choices in one place but the drawback is that it can take time to sift through the options. This can be a problem for time-pressed Christmas shoppers when size, fit, and colour matter.
Vinted, a second hand shop for clothes, solves this with algorithms that quickly begin to understand your style preferences based on what you browse and guide your choices. Gen Z fashion favourite DePop works in the same way.
There are also curated fashion marketplaces that make finding the perfect item easier. Imparfaite is a French vintage clothes shop that compiles item lists that follow seasonal trends. It also has quick-access searches for specific designers and, if all else fails, a detailed filter lists to make things easier.
For discerning interior decorators, there is selency.co.uk, an ‘online flea market’ that offers a rolling range of high quality second-hand furniture. All products are selected by professionals, with a spotlight on Scandinavian design.
For the booklovers in your life, there are few titles you won’t find on abebooks.com – a search engine aggregating thousands of sellers in more than 50 countries. Why not find a preloved coffee table tome on sustainable design or a practical guide on reducing, reusing, and recycling through repairing everyday objects?
Buying sustainable outdoor gear is difficult because of the chemicals and pollutants used to create water-resistant and durable materials. Patagonia is trying to address this with its secondhand marketplace, Worn Wear, that sells brand items traded in by customers. There are steep discounts to be had here on quality items already built to last.
The programme is part of Patagonia strategy to make their products more sustainable by lengthening their lifespan. Like all other Patagonia products, secondhand items are all eligible for repairs by the company. NorthFace also offers a second hand marketplace for their products.
Sustainable beauty: picking through the greenwash
For circular personal care and beauty, knowing which brands are really doing the work on greening their supply chains is difficult. The legal framework around sustainable branding is on the whole patchy, giving wide scope for greenwashing.
Provenance is an environmental audit company that guides shoppers on the products that are made with proven ethical and sustainability practices.
Their online directory of brands features a filter for product segment as well as the social and sustainability criteria you want them to meet – packaging waste reduction and labour standards are just two of the twelve categories that they classify products under.
Once you click on a brand, you are provided with an at-a-glance checklist for which social and environmental responsibility elements their products hit, such as whether they come with refill solutions or source vegan ingredients. Provenance uploads viewable company documentation that lists ingredients and manufacturing processes.
Provenance specialises in tracing beauty products. One of the best scoring brands under their assessments is Haeckels, which offers a huge range of algae-based products made using handpicked biomass from Margate, UK.
Waste materials and perfume don’t often go hand in hand but innovative noses are making unexpected circular scents with waste biomass. ‘I am Trash’, a floral and fruit perfume from Etat Libre d’Orange, is made from upcycled ingredients thrown out by the food industry.
‘Salt Eau de Parfum’ by Ellis Brooklyn comes from leftover cardamom pods, cedarwood sawdust and chips from the furniture industry, and jasmine repurposed from religious ceremonies in India
Food
For food gifts, go for produce from local, regenerative farmers. This avoids the transport air miles and emissions that come with synthetic farming and globalised supply chains. You can find databases of nature-friendly farms in your region online or take a trip to a local farmer’s market.
Supporting local farmers producing under-appreciated, low-carbon crops native to the regional ecosystem is a good bet. For an island nation like the UK, this could mean cultivated oysters and algae, which can have net benefits for the environment.
Atlantic Edge Oysters, an oyster producer in Wales, is engaged in ‘light-touch’ restorative aquaculture while SeaGrown, a hand-harvested seaweed cultivator, has a beautiful range of seaweed seasoning made with their crop. Why not scout for second-hand baskets and fill a hamper with sustainable delicacies?
One-off designs
You can use your Christmas gift purchases to support smaller circular designers. Tableau is a Danish homeware company that creates riotous pieces from recycled materials, like these ombre acrylic side tables.
For indoor gardeners and botanical enthusiasts, LSA International leads with their fluidly elegant recycled glass planters and terrariums that show off fronds, foliage, and root systems in style.
It’s still difficult to find design-conscious circular marketplaces for homeware but The Host is among the first. It sells upcycled items created by a collective of around 40 designers at mid- to upper-range prices, from sushi-serving trays made from industrial waste to mycelium side tables.
Some unusual materials can be found on their site, a byproduct of their zero to low-carbon and low-waste method, like the LUNA range of English bone china tableware that is 50% bone ash waste from the meat industry.
To complete your green table, Weaver Green creates French-style faux-linen tablecloths made from recycled bottles. Some of their range contains organic cotton but there are 100% recycled options too.
Bags, clothes, and accessories
Love to travel in style? UK-based upcycled bag designer Neil Wragg offers a veritable emporium of bold designs made from leather jackets, upholstery, fabrics, leather sofas, and canvas tent. His range covers shopper bags to backpacks and travel pouches.
Everlane’s black backpack made from 100% recycled plastic bottles has the clean lines and pared down look that will suit any look.
For stocking fillers, Liga Ecostore has passport wallets, key chains, and cardholders made from a mixture of organic cork, recycled rubber, and recycled plastics. Their trademark Beach Clean material uses cork and recycled plastics for a multi-colour, speckled finish crafted into more sustainable Christmas decorations, tablemats and coasters.
For dogs
Dog toys are awash in plastics and chemicals but they don’t need to be. Green and Wilds have among the widest ranges of soft, recycled toys in the shape of animals, fruits, and vegetables.
Virgin rubber is another high environmental impact material that gets used in many dog toys. This conch shell chew, which doubles as a treats container, is made from 100% recycled rubber
This upcycled snuffle matt, a textured surface to hide feed or treats, is another way to dogs occupied without plastic.. It’s also a good way to offer meals to fast eaters.
Non-plastic dog bowls are surprisingly hard to find. For a recycled option with a worthy mission, these marble-effect dog bowls made from recycled fishing nets hit the mark.
Wooly Wolf has an entire collection of colour-matched recycled dog accessories, including collapsible travel bowls, snack bags and harnesses in colourful designs inspired by the Nordic environment.
Gifts that prompt action
As with every component of the climate issue, the material intensity of Christmas is a collective problem. Going biobased or circular in our daily habits is not necessarily cheap, highlighting how high-carbon manufacturing is a problem of policy and collective action, not solely of consumer spending choices.
The world’s highest emitting sector is electricity and heat, followed quite a way behind by transport, then manufacturing and construction. Cutting the planetary impact of Christmas will require broad infrastructural shifts – the transport available to visit loved ones, the grid energy mix that heats our homes, the way the environments we hold our celebrations in are built.
But environmentally conscious gifting can prompt shifts in cultural attitudes. Opting for greener choices can raise awareness about the scale of our fossil problem. It forces us to confront the material makeup of our economy and how difficult it is to minimise our footprints without policies that redirect incentives and investments away from carbon-intensive industries whose products dominate the market today.