The Carbon Cost of Christmas

Carbon Cost of Christmas Series: Part One

By Michael Hines

The excitement that “Christmas is coming!” takes over each December, and many people make plans to share the season’s joy through a multitude of traditions.  Gifts are purchased from high streets and online.  Lights are strung to bring a festive glow to this season of short days and long nights.  Copious amounts of food are purchased and devoured.  Extra travel is planned to see loved ones near and far.

We also know that many of you are questioning how sustainable this all is, particularly the high volume of shopping that takes place in December.  For instance, while you want to surprise and delight your loved ones with gifts, you also recognise that unthoughtful consumerism can generate excess greenhouse gas emissions that are causing global climate change. You want approaches that maintain the spirit of Christmas but don’t harm the planet.

Cherwell Collective shares your concerns about the Carbon Cost of Christmas. In this multi-part series, we set out to explain the concept of Carbon Cost and how you can use this tool to build more sustainable holiday traditions.  Our series will cover:  

1. Part One: An Introduction to the Carbon Cost of Christmas (you’re reading it now!)

2. Part Two: Carbon Cost of Fashion and Gift Giving, including:
   • The most climate-friendly clothing options
   • How to find gift ideas in the Circular Economy
   • Other low-carbon gift-giving alternatives such as services and experiences.

3. Part Three: Carbon Cost of travel to help you choose the most sustainable mode of transportation that meets your needs to see your loved ones this season.  

4. Part Four: Carbon Cost of food
   •  help you plan your Christmas feasts
   •  share a recipe idea to help you love your leftovers

What is Carbon Cost, and Why Does it Matter?

Everything we buy has a Carbon Cost. That is, our industries and production lines have a carbon footprint.  It’s the amount of climate-change-inducing greenhouse gas emissions released from activities like food production, manufacturing, electricity production, heating, and transportation.  The emissions include carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, and nitrous oxide.  However, because CO2 is the most prevalent type of emissions, scientists measure all these emissions with a single metric known as a CO2 equivalent (CO2e).  The amount of CO2e released by making something can be thought of as that item’s carbon footprint or Carbon Cost.

When making purchases, we can help our planet by seeking out choices that reduce our Carbon Cost because they entail less emissions of CO2e.

For instance, a fish dinner has a lower Carbon Cost than a beef dinner.  A shirt made from organic cotton has a lower Carbon Cost than one made from ordinary cotton. A single lawnmower purchased and shared by several households has a lower Carbon Cost than if every household purchased its own lawnmower. A train journey has a lower Carbon Cost than one by car.  You get the drift.

Sustainable Swaps Lower Our Carbon Cost

As our society has become more carbon conscious, we’ve already taken steps that have lowered the Carbon Cost of Christmas. For instance, in 2016, the UK and the EU enacted a ban on selling new incandescent light bulbs, and most of those bulbs have now been phased out.  When you purchase new lights to decorate your home or a Christmas tree, they are typically LED lights, which are 90% more efficient than the old lights.  In other words, because they use less electricity, they have only 10% of the Carbon Cost of the old bulbs. Using them produces much less CO2e.

Although the newer style bulbs have a higher upfront cost, they use less energy, and so they cost roughly one-fifth as much to operate.  After a period of as little as six months of use, they cost less overall. 

The Carbon Cost of your electricity usage depends on the electricity mix where you live (i.e. the mix of coal, natural gas, nuclear, solar, wind, etc.). For the UK as a whole, on average, it is 141 grams of CO2e per kilowatt hour. So what does that mean for our Carbon Cost when we switch, say, from lighting a Christmas tree with the old string lights to the newer LED lights?

Let us do the math!

Leaving on a 5-foot Christmas tree using incandescent lights for about 20 days each Christmas season produces the same Carbon Cost as driving a car about 34 miles.  But with the new LED Christmas lights, it’s the same as driving just 3.4 miles.  That switch alone is like driving 30 miles less per year, and that’s just the Christmas tree!

In our upcoming posts, we’ll share some other ideas about other substitutions you can make to lower your Carbon Cost.  We’ll focus on gift-giving (particularly fashion), travel, and food.

Happy Christmas!