Rethinking Your Christmas’s Carbon Footprint

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I was prompted to post on this by an evening drive I took with my family to Lawley Street (-25.780785° 28.242231°) in Waterkloof, a suburb of Pretoria.

Lawley Street is some 1.8 km long and is the address for approximately 90 large suburban houses, many of them are diplomatic corps & embassy residences. This normally quite suburban road was filled with cars crawling up and down its length, all their to see the houses glittering in Christmas lights installed each year by the house owners.

Lawley Street Christmas Decorations
A simple calculation, admittedly involving many assumptions, gives good estimates of the carbon footprint of “The Lawley Lights”.

The most obvious GHG emission is from the lights which burn through the night. There is also an emission from the manufacture and distribution of the lights which is not considered here. The emission of the lights can be calculated at around 4.5 tons CO2 a season. This is similar to the emissions associated with driving a medium sized petrol driven car 20 000 km or a half of South Africa’s annual per capita CO2 emission - so its really very small. Clearly something worthwhile to generate a festive spirit.

The other obvious emission, is that of all the people who visit The Lawley Lights. There is no public transport in the area so one has to drive there and since its normally not possible to pass by on some other trip, it involves a special trip. Calculating this is very dependent on how far we estimate people travel to the area. Assuming a 40 km round trip, including the 4 km up and down the street, gives a total emission of around 300 tons of CO2 a year. This is less than 0.1% of the annual CO2 emissions of the households who visit and insignificantly little of the emissions of all households in South Africa.

In reality its probably a better outing that a visit to a restaurant if one considers it in terms of the carbon footprint.

note: these calculations use sources and methods discussed in my previous blogs Greenwashing the Cape Town Conference Centre? and There is no point in calculating your carbon footprint - you need to understand it!
Carbon Footprint of British Christmas
The Stockholm Environmental Institute at the University of York calculated the following per capita emissions that result from the things Britons do over the three days of Christmas

26 kg of CO2 from Christmas food
96 kg of CO2 from Christmas Car travel
218 kg of CO2 from extravagant lighting displays
310 kg of CO2 on Christmas Shopping
The scary bit is that this ammounts to a total of 650 kg of which is 5.5% of the average annual footprint of Britain.

The numbers used in the calculations are possibly somewhat exagerated but they still show a significant impact. The article goes on to explain how this could be reduced through things such as the use of LED lights, buying local and not exagerating so as to minimise loss.

The difference between the lights at Lawley and this calculation is that a very high wattage is used here but more importantly the decorations in a few homes in Lawley Street are viewed by thousands.

Real vs Artificial Christmas trees
A full Life Cycle Analysis of real and artificial trees, used for six Christmases, showed that the net carbon emission of the artificial tree was more than two and a half times larger than the real tree. The study showed that the artificial tree would need to be used for twenty years to break even with the emissions of the real tree.

But more important is to understand that the actual emissions of 3.1 and 8.1 kg CO2 mean that the effect is very small and can easily be negated by very small actions.

Robin Shreeves wrote on Sustainblog about making sure that the real christmas tree was locally grown to reduce the impact of travel on the emissions. But be careful not to travel far - let the supplier reduce the transport costs by transporting large numbers of trees. The total carbon emissions for a real tree calculated in the LCA was equivalent to only 21 km in an average car.

Other Things to Think About
Reduce the number of gifts you give and try and buy them on other trips that you have to take - otherwise you spend tons of CO2 driving from shop to shop

As far as possible, apply all the normal emission reducing actions you take throughout the year but don’t spoil your enjoyment - it only comes once a year.