Have yourself a more sustainable Christmas this year

Running the risk of ruining Christmas for people, Eoin Flynn pleads with consumers to buy less stuff and to make sure what they do buy is sustainable.

There are days when it feels like my allotted role in life is to ruin things for people. Cars, food, air-con, pets, clothes, even children. You name it, I’ve ruined it for someone.

I don’t want to. I don’t try to. It is just a consequence of my research interests and analysing the problems of ‘stuff’. Given the current season, I am now faced with the inevitable — I must ruin Christmas.

Irish households in December 2017 spent an estimated average of €2,654 on shopping for Christmas, €870 more than any other month in the year, according to Retail Ireland.

This figure doesn’t take into account the amount spent on online purchases; nor the additional miles travelled by cars, trains, buses, boats, and planes to see loved ones; nor the additional energy costs of powering all those fairy lights.

Beyond households, there are even more costs from increased energy required by industries pumping out all the products to meet the greater demand for the stuff we want at Christmas; the increased raw materials to make all that stuff; the increased wastes from all that production; the increased transportation costs of all that production… You get the idea.

As the head of the Sustainable Materials Laboratory in UCC’s Environmental Research Institute, my primary role is to make the everyday items we use less damaging to the planet and its inhabitants.

Much of the materials that we use compose the necessary technologies for life in the modern world: food, energy, transport, the internet, smart devices, clothing, buildings, etc. However, since the industrial revolution, the societies of affluent countries have produced all these things in just about the most damaging ways possible.

This is mostly avoidable. We can make the stuff of civilisation more sustainably and we don’t need a lot of the stuff we buy.

Canny readers have likely already anticipated the course of this article — an ignominious descent into the guilt-ridden depths of consumer culture, before resurfacing in the stagnant air of opprobrium and self-loathing. I am sorry to make you feel so, but there is no escape from it.

The root causes of our damaging consumer culture come from us.

Poorly adapted psychologies, neoliberal economic principles, the basic energy sources of our civilisation, and a whole host of things in between. I will not attempt to address all of these. It would be unspeakably tedious and I am perfectly capable of ruining Christmas by focussing on just one thing – materials.

Let’s just look at materials. “Materials”, to materials scientists, means all the resources, matter, wastes, and any other physical things that compose, or are involved in the processes of making, all our stuff. Currently, we make everything wrong.

Many of our means of production are top-down, use torrents of toxic compounds, and require vast quantities of finite materials, extracted and refined at great environmental expense, and often with harrowing consequences for the most vulnerable people on Earth. We must find ways to make our most crucial materials more sustainable.

Consider the most iconic of Christmas purchases — presents. Jewellery, toys, clothing, laptops, phones, etc.

There is no good reason that they cannot be made of renewable, natural biopolymers, rather than oil-derived plastics. No good reason that the precious minerals in their components cannot be obtained from the recycled remnants of their obsolete ancestors. No good reason that the necessary finite resources required for their manufacture cannot be ethically sourced.

No good reason that the industries making them cannot do so more efficiently. No good reason that the wastes of their production, usage, and disposal cannot be better managed, repurposed, recycled, or rendered biodegradable.

These are the things we try to do at the Sustainable Materials Lab. We develop sustainable alternatives to the unsustainable materials in products and we work with companies to help them do the same. But it is slow progress.

Society as a whole lags behind us in this endeavour. Far behind. There is a lack of short-term economic incentives, a lack of political will for fear of losing votes, and a lack of awareness from consumers so that they can demand these changes.

But how do consumers go about making that demand?

The answer is simple: don’t buy products that aren’t sustainable. Sustainable products exist: ethically sourced smart devices from Apple; renewable, biodegradable biopolymer bottles; non-conflict mineral jewellery; plant-based leather products; mushroom-based product packaging; biopolymer-based clothing fibres — the list is virtually endless.

Articles like this aim to inform you, to empower you, to change consumer demand.

Admittedly, many current sustainable products come at a slightly increased cost. For many companies such products do not sell in large volumes because of lack of consumer demand, and so are less profitable unless the prices increase. However, this is Christmas. Much of what you and I are purchasing are luxuries anyway. If we buy more sustainable products do this for even one single solitary Christmas, it is certain that producers will notice the change in consumer behaviour. And they will develop and produce more sustainable stuff. And prices will come down.

Aside from purchasing more sustainable products, there is something far simpler and more powerful you can do this Christmas — It doesn’t require us to develop fancy advanced materials, or to spend more on items.

In fact, it doesn’t require us to do a damned thing. All we have to do is simply buy less stuff.

We exist in a time of barely conceivable plenty. All but the poorest of us in the affluent societies of Western Europe and North America have more than we need. This is particularly true at Christmas time. A 2017 Pureprofile survey found that Americans ditched $16bn worth of unwanted gifts that year. A separate survey in 2016 by British gift trading website Ziffit found that almost 40% of Britons engage in pre-Christmas clear outs to dump unwanted items to make space for the incoming unwanted tat.

Another 2017 survey, by research website OnePoll, found that Britons threw away 108 million rolls of festive wrapping paper. A good portion of that was certainly used to wrap presents that were unwanted anyway.

In Ireland, we are no better. Repak conducted a survey in 2015 which found that three-quarters of Irish parents threw out old unwanted toys in anticipation of Christmas. In a separate study, Repak found that over Christmas 2017 we generated 83,000 tons of packaging waste. And every year figures like this get worse and worse.

There is no need for this if we just consider the gifts we buy more carefully. People don’t want a lot of what we are going to get them. We don’t want a lot of what we will get.

And when you do buy someone a gift, consider this: study after study after study has shown that humans are made happier by experiences than by paltry physical things.

Research shows that experiential gifts create stronger bonds between the gift giver and the gift receiver. Studies also show that experiences trump physical things when it comes to making humans happy.

Yet more psychological research shows that not only do humans get more benefit from experientialism than materialism, but also we also wilfully ignore that fact. We persist in pursuing the ephemeral happiness of material things, despite knowing better.

Reminisce on the great gifts of your life. What you recall are almost certainly not the unwanted bottles of cheap perfume grabbed at the last minute, nor the cheap plastic toys that bulked out Christmas stockings, nor the €3 headphones snatched from the bargain bin. Consider your gift giving more carefully.

And so, if I haven’t utterly ruined your Christmas, if I haven’t left you wracked with regret and shame, if you have weathered this storm of accusations and denunciations, you find yourself wanting to be a better consumer this year, do these two things:

Buy less stuff. You don’t want most of it anyway and it doesn’t make you happy.

Whatever you must buy, make sure it is sustainable. Use the power in your wallet to demand a better world.

Dr Eoin Flynn leads the Sustainable Materials Laboratory in University College Cork’s Environmental Research Institute.