It must be stressed at the start of this post that the perfect green gift probably doesn’t exist. There are many possible criteria by which the environmentally friendly nature of gifts can be judged, and one criterion will often come into conflict with another criterion. Such is the pragmatic nature of life. For example, something that is made locally cuts down on transport and carbon costs, but a bamboo item made in China can nevertheless be viewed as green despite coming from the over side of the world (if you live in Europe or America) because it is made from a renewable resource. It is up to the reader to judge the importance of each perspective on what is green, and what the relative weight of each criterion should be. I will simply list ways that a gift can be considered green.

Transport

As mentioned in the introduction, the journey a gift makes from manufacture to point of sale impacts on how green an item is. The world is wasting resources shifting factories and products over the world at the behest of ‘the market’ that looks for cheap labor costs. Moreover, the transport of the buyer is a valid addition to this category. Do you drive many miles to go to a mall to buy presents or do you buy locally? Perhaps the greenest present is one where a person gets on his or her bike to a local shop and makes a purchase. This way that person has added a zero to the carbon emissions involved in the gift.

Materials

The other topic I mentioned in the introduction was materials. The world is running out of oil, natural gas and coal. Plastics are mostly made from petro-chemical derivatives. Forests are being cleared at an alarming rate. The search for new mineral deposits is taking companies to ever more remote and dangerous locations. Better to buy gifts made from  bamboo, coconut, rattan or water hyacinth and other renewable resources. Better still is to recycle or upcycle waste to make new gifts.

Energy Saving

Carbon emissions are connected to energy saving. If we can reduce our consumption of energy we at the same time reduce carbon emissions. Thus Energy Star approved items like programmable thermostats, LED and CFL lights, and energy efficient fridges have a lot to recommend themselves as green gifts. The same criterion makes products involved in alternative and ‘green energy’ also environmentally friendly such as photovoltaic panels and rechargeable batteries.

Pollution

It is necessary to look at the whole history of a product from raw material gathering to final disposal to find out the true amount of pollution it entails. uPVC window production releases dioxins. Modern detergents pollute ground water supplies. Products that are hard to recycle end up in landfills and leach chemicals into the ground. Buying a product from a shop that promises to recycle the item at the end of its life is an important pledge to the environment. Buying CFLs and then throwing them away in the regular garbage is defeating the purpose of the energy saving light bulbs.

These are only a few (but perhaps some of the most important) criteria concerning how green a gift is. It is vital that the reader think about the larger picture if he or she wants to give green gifts this Christmas.