The dinner table is the focal point of Christmas. Yet festive entertaining can take a toll on the environment, with fossil plastics present in many household items.
A greener, less wasteful Christmas is possible with biobased, biodegradable alternatives. Here is how to lay a plastic-free Christmas table for guests that cuts landfill waste.
Biodegradable placemats: not just cotton or linen
Plastics tend to crop up in unexpected places. These include placemats, often made from the fossil product melamine and backed with cork or felt to protect the table surface. Placemats made of faux leather will often have a lot of plastics inside them.
Luckily, 100% biobased and biodegradable placemats are not hard to find. If you need new place settings for the season, there are a variety of plant-fibre options on the market including organic jute, seagrass, and bamboo. These ornate rattan placemats, made from palm stems, are extra luxurious.
As well as being biodegradable, placemats made entirely from plant fibre materials tend to have a lower carbon footprint. Even compared to biobased textiles like linen or cotton, which are highly resource-intensive, jute, bamboo, palm, and seagrass are fast-growing, grass-like species with minimal need for heavy-duty fertilisers. They also tend to be efficient at sequestering carbon.
Oil-free Christmas decor
Christmas decor can be awash in plastics. Plastic baubles are the obvious culprit but ribbons, string, and garlands made from polyester are all too common at this time of year.
Christmas cheer is possible without the plastic content. The environmentally conscious decorator still has a wide variety of materials to draw on. Glass baubles, paper stars and baubles, foraged natural elements or garden clippings are all less environmentally damaging ways to deck the halls.
Hand-made paper and botanical decorations can add personality to your table without environmentally suspect chemicals or materials. Crafting can be more time-consuming than shopping for ready-made decor but a single centrepiece like floating plant garlands or a decorated branch mobile can dramatically transform a table in a way that is completely unique to your home. Laying fresh foliage down the middle of the table and interspersing with candles quickly completes the festive look.
Glue and sellotape are two craft supplies where fossil inputs are usually unavoidable. However, for those determined to eliminate toxic ingredients from their decor altogether, you can make a home-made version from boiled corn starch.
Glitter is a hallmark of the Christmas season and a go-to for crafting but it is best to avoid. It is now known to be a major pollutant and source of microplastics, made from PET which does not break down in the environment.
The exception may be Bioglitter, which claims its vegetable film product is the world’s only glitter that degrades naturally and harmlessly under natural conditions, not just in industrial composting plants. Another eco-friendly glitter producer, Sparxell, is now in the works, a spinoff of Cambridge University research into plant cellulose-based glitter.
Natural materials for napkins and tablecloths
Plastics and fossil chemicals can also find their way into tablecloths and runners in the form of PVC or acrylic coating.
Avoid buying plastic-coated tablecloths and opt for pure cotton or linen instead. Using a secondhand fabric for the festive table is even better for the environment because it saves old items from landfill. Circular economy principles of keeping materials in use for as long as possible comes into its own over Christmas when material consumption peaks and novelty becomes the norm.
For table napkins as well, fabric is more sustainable than paper. They have longer lifespans and are often more effective at mopping up spills.
Linen or cotton are the go-to biomaterials for table napkins and tablecloths. But a much more sustainable fabric is hemp. Hemp’s capabilities as a functional and decorative fabric are on full display in these Protea napkins that have a delicate botanical sketch stitched into them.
Woven hemp behaves very similarly to linen and cotton but it is less environmentally impactful because the crop can survive on less water and needs fewer pesticides and chemicals to thrive.
Cutlery
If you’re entertaining very large groups, disposable cutlery can be hard to avoid. In this case, support plant-based, home-compostable alternatives like Twenty Fifty Fork. Its attractive rice flour-based cutlery are neutral tasting and designed to compost at home without the need for special treatment facilities, as with many renewable materials on the market.
BioPak is a leading provider of compostable cutlery options offering a large suite of disposable foodware from cold drink cups and lids to plates. What’s helpful about the website is that it labels products clearly in terms of whether they are home compostable, like these palm leaf plates, or not.
A word of caution on biobased cutlery is that many so-called ‘biodegradable’ products can only break down in industrial facilities that specialise in treating these material.. These industrial composting facilities are few and far between, meaning any material needing their treatment processes is more likely to end up in the landfill than get broken down safely.
What’s more worrying is that even ‘home compostable’ materials – supposedly meant to break down safely in ordinary home compost heaps – may not do what they claim to: 60% of home compostable plastic did not fully break down according to a UK-wide research study.
There are currently no international or national standards for home compostable packaging and plastics, leaving consumers unable to compare and contrast various sustainability claims on products. In the meantime, using old-fashioned wood, ceramic or metal cutlery and plates is the safest bet.
If reusable cutlery isn’t an option, the other alternative is edible cutlery – if you can eat it, you can be sure it degrades. Australian startup Good Edi manufactures oat and grain fibre cups designed to break down within a few weeks. It can hold food and liquids without leaking for up to eight hours – perfect partyware. Other startups in the edible food packaging space are London’s NotPla, which uses seaweed feedstock, and DisSolves, founded in 2018 in the US.
So far, consumer uptake on edible foodware has been slower than expected so commercial quantities are hard to get hold of, but made-to-order, branded edible foodware might just be right for a corporate gathering.
Compostable bakeware
What is Christmas without the choicest puff pastries and plumpest puddings?
Unfortunately for many eco-aware hosts, baking equipment is one area where it’s still quite hard to find biodegradable substitutes. Plastic like silicone and fossil-based chemical coatings like Teflon are so ubiquitous that cooks can’t imagine a kitchen without them.
The French bakeware company Panibois makes baking moulds from popular, aspen or birch wood but the brand is geared towards commercial baking rather than the occasional home baker. Their wooden moulds are reusable only if you use a replaceable paper liner each time.
For decorating pastry, cookies, and moulding chocolates, you can get wooden stamps, carved moulds, and patterned rolling pins rather than the common silicone tools.
Home bakers are still waiting for their range of compostable, reusable muffin tins, trays, and dessert moulds. Perhaps one for the biobased Christmas wish list.
Candles over LED lights
The magic of LED lighting may be hard to resist at Christmas time but the biobased dinner table should find alternatives. The tangle of plastic on the lighting will most likely never get recycled once it reaches the end of its lifespan. LED bulbs have low recycling rates thanks to multiple materials that make sorting difficult.
Thankfully, candles offer an easy and more romantic substitute to LED lighting. Most cheaper brands use paraffin wax, a byproduct of the oil industry so opt for beeswax, soy, or other plant-based waxes for a biobased alternative. Soy candles produce less soot and toxic chemicals than candles made from paraffin. Lesser known natural candle alternatives include vegetable and coconut wax.
Plastic wrapping
The biobased, biodegradable Christmas party doesn’t end at the dining table. What happens to leftovers matters too.
Plastic cling film is the go-to for storing food leftovers but reusable beeswax wraps are a much more sustainable way to preserve turkey cuttings. They are made of simple cotton sheets covered in beeswax. Once the wax coating wears off, usually after two years of use, you can buy top it up with a fresh coat.
As for how to stop food scraps reaching the bin altogether, there are limited options here unless you live in a handful of countries with a system of residential food waste collection.
France has made it mandatory for all households and businesses to get their food waste collected. South Korea has a similar scheme. The idea is to recycle organic matter back into the food system (as fertiliser or feed) or the energy grid (as feedstock for biogas plants).
The UK plans to roll-out residential and business food waste collection services by mid-2026, just in time for a circular Christmas.
Plastic-free crackers
Many crackers contain plastic trinkets so opt for brands that do without. In the UK, the Royal Horticultural Society makes organic crackers using compostable materials, for example, that do not contain plastic and can be planted for next spring. The Little Green Cracker Company’s luxury lobster crackers contain gorgeous natural gifts.
Fashioning tiny gift bags with leftover wrapping paper is an alternative to crackers altogether. For a guide to sustainable gifting, take a look at our feature on this from last year.
If you are feeling more adventurous, DIY crackers are hard to beat for a personalised Christmas table. Parisian pastry chef and thrifter-extraordinaire Ainsley Du Rose has posted a guide to making your own using toilet roll and wrapping paper.
Ainsley’s cracker gift finds at a local flea market is also a masterclass in second-hand sourcing, showing that putting circular principles into practice can become a venerable Christmas tradition in itself.