Have a happy holiday (without all the trash)

Noah Buhayar is a fellow at the Rocky Mountain Institute.

A friend here in Western Colorado recently asked me what we could do to cut down on trash this time of year. She had just spent the day unpacking Christmas ornaments for the small garden and nursery where she works, and she was shocked by the volume of Styrofoam, plastic, and cardboard soon piled in the back of the shop.

"Was it really worth generating all that waste to sell a few ornaments?" she wondered. Surely there was an alternative.

Packaging is no new facet in our day-to-day lives. Pretty much everything we buy comes in some sort of container, wrap, bag, box, or envelope.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, more than 30 percent of Americans' municipal solid waste (that includes all the stuff we landfill, recycle, burn, or compost) is packaging.

This time of year, the problem gets even bigger. From Thanksgiving to New Year's, household waste grows by about 25 percent -- from 4 to 5 million tons per week.

The costs of buying and dealing with all that junk are staggering. One recent study found that for every dollar the American consumer spends on goods, about nine cents is spent on packaging.

And that's to say nothing of the costs that consumers pay to haul the stuff to the dump -- let alone the too-often-unaccounted-for environmental costs of harvesting forests, drilling for oil, or using any other raw material to make the packaging in the first place.

Everyone can play a part in reducing packaging waste by changing their buying habits. This is especially true during the holiday season, as we choose gifts for our loved ones.

The key question to ask is: How much satisfaction will you or your loved one get from the service provided by the packaging?

If the answer is not very much, try to think of an alternative. That may mean buying in bulk, taking your own shopping bags to the store, or checking to see that the products you buy have packaging that is recyclable in your area.

Even if consumers change their buying habits, much of the packaging waste still wouldn't be saved. That's because business and industry is the major source of discarded packaging.

Think of all the trash generated by a factory or a retail store that has to unpack its entire inventory before putting it on display. My friend's experience with the holiday ornaments is a case in point.

The good news is that many businesses are wising up. Rather than trash all that plastic, Styrofoam, and cardboard, companies are finding that it is increasingly in their interest not only to recycle packaging waste, but also to reduce the amount of packaging they use in the first place.

Take Wal-Mart, for example. Three years ago, the company set an ambitious goal to eliminate all its waste by 2025 (part of a larger sustainability initiative). In pursuit of that goal, the company is aggressively recycling and encouraging its suppliers to use less packaging themselves. In the process, they're turning the cost of waste disposal into real, bottom-line savings.

Wal-Mart's experience shows that getting rid of what we don't want (waste packaging) won't just feel good; it can be profitable.

Enter advocates of "zero waste." With rates of recycling stagnant or on the decline in most of the United States, some social entrepreneurs are dreaming up ways to eliminate the concept of waste from their communities.

Instead of dealing with waste once it's generated, they're focusing upstream at the source. They're lobbying government to quit subsidizing landfills and incinerators. And they're encouraging consumers to change their buying habits.

Some organizations that led the campaign for recycling a few decades ago have started to re-think their missions along these lines. Instead of only helping communities and companies recycle more, they're helping them to find zero-waste solutions.

By forming public-private partnerships, groups like Eco-Cycle in Boulder, Colorado, hope to encourage their communities to adopt zero-waste goals, then form public-private partnerships to achieve them.

According to an article by Eco-cycle's Executive Director, Eric Lombardi, the potential revenue from such partnerships could be substantial -- as much as $2.5 billion a year.

Now that's a holiday gift that's green both ways.