- December 29, 2023
Christmas is over and New Year’s Eve is fast approaching.
Whilst it’s a much smaller celebration compared to Christmas, New Year’s Eve still contributes to waste and emission. With this in mind, we’ve pulled together a guide to help you have a sustainable New Year’s Eve following your sustainable Christmas!
Shop local
Much like Christmas, New Year’s Eve wouldn’t be the same without the food and drinks. As we talked about when discussing a sustainable Christmas, one way to make your New Year’s greener is to buy your food and drink from local, independent retailers.
If you’re having guests over and putting on a spread, use a local butcher to buy your meat. They usually sell trimmings too, so you could entirely cater your party using their supplies.
Another way to be green is to replace meat with meat-free and vegetable products.
Shop recyclable
Depending on how big your New Year’s Eve is, you should be able to use your existing crockery to host it. Plates, bowls, glasses – it’s eco-friendly as well as cost effective to use the ones you already have!
However, if you’re having a lot of people over, or want to do something a little different, try to buy ethically made and sustainable crockery. Buy paper plates and wooden cutlery that’s recyclable, and source your cups from somewhere that produces them in an eco-friendly way.
Reuse decorations
Lots of your Christmas decorations can be reused and repurposed for New Year’s Eve. Anything bright, shiny, and colourful would work well. You can also save time by leaving them up after Christmas.
You’ll save money by not having to buy more decorations!
Send evites
This is probably the easiest one to do.
If you’re inviting lots of people over, avoid using physical invites. If you really want to send invites through the post, source them from sustainable retailers and make sure both the invite and the card is recyclable or plantable.
But with evites, you’ll save time and money as well as help the environment by inviting people over by email or text. To make life easier you can even set up a text group, meaning you invite everyone at once and can send updates if needed.
Make your celebrations sustainable
One thing that makes New Year’s Eve different from Christmas is that it centralises around a very specific time – midnight!
Once the clock ticks over to midnight and the new year officially begins, lots of people like to let off streamers, party poppers, confetti, and balloons. Whilst these are pretty and add fun to New Year’s Eve parties, they’re quite bad for the environment as they contain microplastics! They’re a great deal of harm to humans too.
You don’t have to stop using these celebratory items – we would just suggest sourcing sustainable and ethical ones instead. There are lots of companies which now sell dried leaves as confetti. It looks very similar and works just as well without creating a negative impact on the environment. The same goes for streamers and party poppers too.
You can even buy biodegradable balloons. Of course these will still end up in a landfill, however they won’t be there for as long as regular balloons – where they can take hundreds of years to degrade, a sustainable balloon will degrade in around six months to a year.
Whilst it’s far from ideal to be adding to landfills, it’s better to do so temporarily.
New Year’s resolutions
As we keep saying, being able to have a fully sustainable New Year’s Eve would be fantastic, but implementing just a couple of sustainable ideas is better than nothing.
And having a sustainable New Year’s Eve could be the springboard for a fully sustainable 2024. Whether it’s one of your resolutions or not, this could be a good way to incorporate sustainability into your everyday life.