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How to Green Your Holidays

Christmas is upon us and with the joy and celebrations come the piles of torn wrapping paper, mounds of food waste, busted string lights,and other stresses that will make Mother Nature shout “Bah humbug!”. But it doesn’t have to be like that. It’s possible to celebrate Christmas without creating a trash pile for Santa’s elves.

  • Collect your coffee (and planner stickers) in a For Here mug or your own reusable tumbler. 

How many coffees do you need to buy to get a free planner? How many thousands of people want the same planner you do? Multiply the two and you have an idea how many paper cups are thrown in landfills just this Christmas season to get that free planner. But it doesn’t have to be this way!

Bring your own mug and save the planet. As a bonus, many coffee shops (both chain and independent) give you a discount for bringing your own mug. Chances are, by the time you collect enough stickers for that planner, you’d have saved enough from the cup discount to buy yourself a bonus coffee.

  • Unplug your Christmas lights before you go to sleep.

If you’ve had your Christmas lights installed since November 1st, you’re probably already feeling the monetary pinch from keeping them running all the time. Remember to unplug your lights before you go to sleep. Anyway, no one’s awake to appreciate them. If you can, invest in LED lights too. While they cost more in the beginning, they also last longer and are safer to use.

Christmas Spirit

  • Unplug appliances before you leave town.

Appliances left plugged in still use electricity – often called “phantom energy” – so unplug them when not in use, and especially when you’re about to leave on a long trip.

genius invention: why didn't I think of this?

  • Say no to food waste.

Food waste – whether it’s the waste from food preparation (think peelings) or waste from your plate – almost always also ends up in landfills. Once there, they decompose without air and produce methane.  Methane is an even worse greenhouse gas compared to carbon dioxide, trapping 28 to 36 times more heat compared to CO2.

Reduce food waste by planning properly so that there are no leftovers. If there are leftovers, give them away or eat them right away before they spoil.

Compost the food prep waste. If you have even a small garden, you can compost at home using the Bokashi method. If you need to compost food waste from a large party (your company party maybe?), consider hiring a composting service like Green Space.

The aftermath 3

  • Go for greener gifting.

Everybody loves gifts. We love getting them and we love giving them (to people we actually like). But to soften the blow to the environment and avoid all the messy post-unwrapping cleanup, consider:

  • Gifts that don’t need to be wrapped, like tickets to concerts or classes and store gift certificates. One of my friends gave me gift certificate for classes with Writer’s Block Philippines and it’s one of my favorite things ever.
  •  

  • Gifts that keep on giving, like donations to charity on behalf of your recipient
  • Buying gifts from environmentally and socially conscious SMEs. Buying locally made items from local companies supports more jobs and keeps the money inside our economy. Last year, I gave away bottles of tea concentrate from Bayani Brew. The tea leaves come from small Filipino farmers who are paid fairly, the price is right, and the tea itself is damned good. I’m also a big fan of SGD Coffee, who buys their beans directly from small farmers in Sagada,
  • Placing gifts in reusable gift bags. I save all the paper gift bags from the previous Christmas so I can reuse them for the next year. If you don’t like paper gift bags, maybe you can learn the art of furoshiki instead.

For this year’s gifts, I’ve gone for the following:

  • Bath and Home Care gift sets from Messy Bessy for the family titos and titas. Messy Bessy’s corporate gift guide, Christmas catalog, and regular catalog are available for download:

Messy Bessy Corporate Gift Guide 2018

Messy Bessy CATALOG 2018

They offer free shipping within Metro Manila for orders worth at least Php 5,000. If you’re getting items from the regular catalog, they offer 5% discount and free shipping for orders worth at least Php 5,000.

  • Baby-safe liquid laundry detergent from Messy Bessy for my brother and sister-in-law (and super cute niece)
  • Books from Adarna House and Tahanan Books for my inaanaks. Support local authors and publishers!
  • Homemade goodies for my friends and cousins. Yes, they are my (unwilling) test subjects for my baking.

 Merry Christmas everyone!

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Six steps for a sustainable Valentine’s Day

Author’s note: I originally wrote this article for our corporate blog but I couldn’t include links to other companies. To remedy that (and also to point people in the right direction), I’m posting the original article with the links to specific service providers here in the Philippines. Hope this helps!
The day of hearts is upon us again and thousands of Filipinos (and their sweethearts) will be joining in the Valentine’s Day festivities. Chocolate, flowers, and cards will fly off the shelves in the frenzy of gift-giving, while tables at the trendiest restaurants will be booked way in advance. But in the haze caused by the heady romance in the air and the hustle and bustle of finding the perfect gift for your sweetie, we tend to forget to show some love for our mother too – Mother Earth. With only a little time and creativity, you can buy or create beautiful gifts that your significant other and the environment will thank you for.

1. Got something to say? Say it with a handmade card made of recycled materials.

Nothing says “I love you” and “I appreciate you” better than a card made with love, and the Earth will love you too if it’s made of recycled materials. If you’re not the crafty type, shops also sell cards made of recycled paper.

Merry Valentine's Day! PC
Cheesy yet effective. And Earth-friendly too!

2. Sweeten the deal with locally-made chocolate.

Give chocolate with a Filipino twist. Theo & Philo sells chocolate made with cacao beans from Davao and sugar from Bacolod, with varieties like Barako (milk chocolate with organic barako coffee), Labuyo (dark chocolate with chili), and Green Mango & Salt (dark chocolate with dried green mangoes and salt). My friend Rima vouches for the deliciousness of their dark chocolate.

organic spring flowers3. Flatter with organic flowers.

Did you know that 196 million roses were sold in the United States for Valentine’s Day 2011? It’s the #1 holiday for florists, catching 40% of holiday dollar volume. Unfortunately, most of those roses were imported from South America and grown on farms that use fertilizers and pesticides extensively. Filipinos have it easier as most Philippine florists already grow their flowers locally, usually in Baguio, Tagaytay, or Mindanao. To take it another step further, choose locally and organically grown flowers.

4. Give stuffed animals with more heart.

Consider giving stuffed animals that do more than gather dust on a shelf. By symbolically adopting a giant panda or dolphin plush toy, you help WWF-Philippines raise awareness for endangered animals and habitat conservation, conduct dolphin stranding workshops, and buy dolphin rescue kits. Each adopted animal comes with a customized adoption certificate and species information card.

5. Cooking is caring.Sunday Cooking-6

For a more personal and healthier touch, how about staying in and cooking an organic meal together? It’s more quality time together as a couple, you avoid the (worse than usual) traffic that’s sure to surface on this day, and it’s good for your body and the environment. Perhaps you might even have those locally-made chocolates for dessert!

6. Spend a day outside. 
This can tie in with #5. Cook your organic food early, pack a basket, and picnic in a nature park or other protected area. Your park entrance fees go towards the protection and maintenance of the park and their environmental education initiatives. Both the Ninoy Aquino Parks and Wildlife Center and the La Mesa Ecopark are within Metro Manila and are easily accessible. Other possibilities are the Hundred Islands National Park in Pangasinan and Apo Reef Natural Park in Mindoro Occidental. For the ultimate and Earth-loving romantic getaway, consider a luxury green hotel within the El Nido-Taytay Managed Resource Protected Area. Activities like snorkeling, diving, windsurfing, kayaking, birdwatching, and hiking maximize your enjoyment of nature’s wonders while minimizing your environmental impact. Their partner airline also offers a carbon offset program, where a minimum donation buys six seedlings that will be planted and taken care of in your name in the Brgy. Villa Libertad watershed area.

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The books I gave for Christmas

I admit it: I love giving books as gifts because 1) it’s always a challenge to come up with something that the recipient will like, and 2) getting it right is a huge rush. And hey, books are gifts that keep on giving because you can always pass them around when you’re done with them 🙂

The books I gave this Christmas:

“Something Borrowed” by Emily Giffin

  • To whom: Mom
  • Why: My mom loves her rom-com novels. After a long day at the bakery, all she wants to do when she gets home is relax AKA no thinking involved. I’ll probably give her a Julia Quinn novel next year.

“Dog Tricks” by Mary Ray and Justine Harding

  • To whom: Dad
  • Why: because we have two American Cocker Spaniels at home who my dad loves as much as his (human) children 😛

“1,000 Places to See Before You Die” (2nd edition) by Patricia Schultz

  • To whom: Mom and Dad
  • Why: because these two folks love to travel. Upon browsing the book, they were tickled to find out that they’ve already been to quite a few places on the list. Mom always says that we (her children) are way luckier than she was because we started traveling while we were still young. (My parents took me on my trip out of the country when I was 12, compared to my mom first going abroad when she was almost 30.) My mom also believes in spending her hard-earned money on experiences like traveling instead of on stuff.

“Leviathan” by Scott Westerfeld

  • To whom: my younger-younger brother
  • Why: because he likes to read (OMG IT MAKES ME SO HAPPY TO WRITE THAT). After successfully getting him hooked on Harry Potter (after many years of trying!), I steered him towards Neil Gaiman (The Graveyard Book gets a thumbs-up), then Eoin Colfer (he says Artemis Fowl is okay), then Rick Riordan (he loves Percy Jackson). For my encore, I figured I couldn’t go wrong with an Aurealis Award-winning steampunk novel that was also listed by YALSA as one of their “2010 Best Books for Young Adults”. Will be borrowing this book from him once he’s done with it.

“That Summer” by Sarah Dessen

  • To whom: my younger sister
  • Why: because I needed a novel targeted towards teenage girls that did not feature 1) vampires, 2) werewolves, 3) angels, 4) demons, 5) shapeshifters, or 6) some other supernatural thing. Seriously. I asked the guy at the Customer Service counter in Fully Booked if he could recommend something and all he could say was “Uhhhh….”. *facepalm* Thankfully, I remembered that Danes lent me some Sarah Dessen books via Kindle (that I haven’t read yet >_<) and Danes would never give me anything shitty.

For my other brother, my Christmas gift was doing all of his Christmas shopping and gift wrapping plus a Doctor Who shirt 😛

Happy holidays everyone and have an awesome 2012!