Christmas Crafternoons 2020

Every Christmas, our Christmas activities have a huge impact on our environment. An inordinate amount of waste is generated every single year. Each year:

• 95 million Christmas cards are put in the bin. That’s over 13,000 wheelie bins full!
• In the UK, 154,000,000 pieces of plastic from Christmas crackers end up in landfill, incinerated or in our oceans.
• 19,000 miles of wrapping paper is used. That’s enough to wrap mainland Scotland’s coastline 2 and a half times! Most of this is disposed of by landfill or is incinerated.
• We import more than 10,000 tonnes of gifts from China, with many of these gifts never used and eventually thrown out.

In 2020, we decided it was time to have a greener Christmas and we organised a number of take home Christmas Crafternoon activities. There were designed to help our community source and create unique gifts and traditional Christmas items that are kinder to the environment. Packs included:

• Making reusable Christmas crackers
• Sewing festive snack bags
• Making plastic-free Origami baubles: stars & houses
• Making tea light jars
• Making a Christmas wreath.

We also partnered up with 88 Degrees café and released two Christmas themed bake-along tutorials; vegan mince pies and gingerbread cookie villages. Our Christmas Crafternoon Activity Packs were wonderfully received, with over 80 individual people purchasing various packs and getting involved from the safety of their own homes, at a time when we couldn’t get together.

All of our demonstration videos remain on our YouTube channel so that you can get crafting in an environmentally friendly way next Christmas too! In the meantime, take a look at some of this years participants wonderful creations below.