Welcome back to the 12 Days of Trash! In days 5-8, we tackle:
- Day Five: Toy & Gift Packaging
- Includes: Mixed Packaging (Battery Packaging, Plastic with Cardboard, Bottles with Tin Sealer) & Bubble Wrap (Air Packaging, Amazon Sealed Air, Air-Filled Packs)
- Day Six: Wrapping Paper (Gift Wrap, Christmas Gift Wrap)
- Day Seven: Food Packaging & Food Waste
- Includes too much to show here → we’ll tackle it below.
- Day Eight: Christmas Crackers (Christmas Poppers, Non-Explosive)
Once again, our amazing customer – The City of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan – handles the education and communication of how to dispose this week’s items incredibly utilizing their Waste Wizard tool. We encourage you to head over to their tool and check it out.
Before we dive in, a quick reminder of why Holiday Waste is such a problem, with some quick facts:
- There is a 25% increase of household waste between Thanksgiving Day (USA) and New Years Day.
- There is an increase of food purchases, much of which ends up thrown away – resulting in a 25% increase in food waste.
- The average American produces 5 pounds of trash per day, or 35 pounds each week. During the holidays, that rises to 6.25 pounds per person per day, or 43.75 pounds each week.
- That translates to an extra 2.9 BILLION tons of waste in landfills per week – and that’s only in the US
The good news: 80% of holiday waste can be reused, re-purposed, or recycled.
The bad news: it often isn’t.
Day 7: Food Packaging & Food Waste
Our focus today is Day Seven: Food Packaging & Food Waste
Included within this day are the following items:
- Protein and Bones: Raw or Cooked (Meat, Seafood, Chicken Bones, Shrimp Tails)
- Tin and Aluminum: Trays, Foil, and Plates (Foil Trays, Roasting Pans, Pie Plates, Tin Foil)
- Tin Containers (Chocolate Box, Cookie Tin, Metal Lunch Kit)
- Baked Goods (Cookies, Cake, Muffins, Croissant, Pie, Buns, Bread)
- Multi-Layer Paper Bag: Containing Food Items (Paper Coffee Bag, Paper Pet Food Bag)
- Wax and Parchment Paper
- Plastic Wrap (Saran Wrap, Cling Wrap)
- Plastic or Foil-Lined Wrappers (Candy Wrapper, Granola Bar Wrapper, Foil Butter Wrapping)
- Butcher’s Wrap (Paper Meat Wrap)
- And more!
A not so fun fact about food waste: 70 billion pounds of food waste are sent to the landfill every year, with the heaviest losses during the holidays.
12 Days of Trash - The Next 4 Days
This week, all 4 Days of Trash can be found on our social feed.
To keep up with us live, follow our LinkedIn page or our Facebook page, where you can get all our updates daily.
For more around year end festivities, check out 23 Reasons to Celebrate Waste & Recycling in 2023.
In summary, you can reduce holiday waste by targeting and communicating holiday waste collection offenders. Recycling can be confusing all year round, but we definitely see new and unusual items during the holidays causing extra confusion and contamination.
Sometimes it’s hard for people to know exactly what is recyclable and what isn’t, and often they make bad choices without meaning to.
To Ho-Ho-Halt holiday waste contamination, help your citizens make better choices with our purpose-built Community tools, designed to curb contamination, streamline communication, and protect the planet.
