KEY POINTS:
Most of the damage has been done by now. Over the past two weeks you will have determined the shape and size of your ecological festive footprint, defined by how far you have travelled and indeed how far your Christmas dinner has travelled - a turkey reared in Thailand might have a 4.5kg CO2 footprint - through to the amount of plastic packaging surrounding the bath set you gave to Auntie Mabel.
Fingers crossed you have spent the past fortnight with tasteful LED lighting, minimal packaging and locally reared turkey.
If not, don't despair. You may be looking at unfeasibly large mounds of festive trash - British homes have produced 736,574 tonnes of extra rubbish in the past two weeks - but think of it as a great chance to recycle.
In fact, if your local authority has any sense, it will have been foisting the idea of Yuletide recycling on you for some time; Babergh, South Suffolk, in the east of England, even has a podcast on it.
Recycling (a) avoids huge landfill penalties incurred by carting extra waste off in black sacks, and (b) given that the recycling prowess of local bodies is based on weight, post-Christmas waste gives them the chance to move up league tables.
On average, each household should provide an extra five glass bottles or jars, six cans, seven plastic bottles and 3.5kg of paper and card, all able to be recycled easily.
But why should you comply? Well, if everyone recycled the 24 million glass jars of pickles, mincemeat and cranberry sauce consumed, it would save enough energy to boil water for 60 million cups of tea.
It is debatable whether we will ever be weaned off Christmas cards; empty out the national bin and you'll find 17 for every person.
And there's the matter of dealing with the redundant conifer in your living room. Somehow the idea persists that Christmas trees should be left outside to "rot naturally". Not so. While dead wood is crucial to maintain biomass in forests, a rotting pine tree in the corner of the patio is a waste. They are better mulched for woodland or chipped for playgrounds.
I'm adding an extra "R", besides recycling, to the waste hierarchy: "Rot", since Christmas waste makes a self-sufficient compost.
You've got lots of high-moisture leftovers which rot easily. Balance that with something dry for fibre, such as paper (scrunched to provide air pockets). If Santa didn't front with a compost bin, treat yourself to one in the January sales.
- OBSERVER
