This is the time of year when many countries and traditions have major holidays.  Most of these holidays include large meals with friends and relatives, and the menus include lots of traditional favorites.  If you are hosting one of these meals, it’s easy to end up with more food than you can eat before it spoils.  Reducing holiday food waste starts well before the holiday meal. 

• Plan your everyday meals before the holidays to use up the perishable foods in your refrigerator and pantry.  That pre-holiday food might not get eaten after holiday leftovers crowd the refrigerator. 
• Determine if your guests are likely to bring food to supplement your menu, even if they don’t tell you ahead of time.  If so, plan to reduce your menu items. 
• When planning your meals, consider how many guests are coming and what portion sizes are appropriate for each guest.  Not everyone is a big eater, and if there are lots of choices, most people will eat only small portions of each food.  Are you planning to send leftovers home with each guest?  How many leftovers can you eat?  This will help you decide how much of each dish to make so that the leftovers can be effectively eaten.
• Determine what leftovers can be frozen for later.  Freeze them the next day while they are still fresh.
• Some people use the turkey carcass to make soup stock, or a ham bone can be used when making a bean dish.  Leftover vegetables might be good added to the soup.  Try to be inventive so as little food gets into the trash as possible.
  

As the attached article says, “eco-friendly living is as much about what you don’t buy as what you do.  Reducing your consumption, especially of one-time-use or plastic items, is vital to reducing your ecological footprint.”  The article discusses four things, but it only takes a few minutes to think of many other “disposable” items that you can live without.  It just takes a little more pre-planning and washing/laundering the reusable items.  The four items discussed in the article are disposable razors, dryer sheets, zip-top plastic bags, and paper towels.  There is a potential fire safety concern if cloth towels soaked with a lot of cooking grease are dried in a heated clothes dryer after laundering, but for most other uses, cloth towels can be laundered again and again.  And you can repurpose old clothing, bath towels, and other fabric items as your cleaning towels.  Even if something is biodegradable or compostable, throwing it away after one use wastes the resources used to manufacture it and may create methane in the landfill.  Here are a few more items to consider:

• Take your own reusable container to the restaurant for your leftover food.
• Use your own reusable water bottle or coffee mug whenever possible.
• If you use plastic eating utensils for a party, collect them to wash and reuse.  Use washable plates instead of paper plates and ask guests to pitch in to wash dishes before they leave.  At work, ask employees to bring their own plates and silverware to group meals instead of providing disposables. 
• This list would not be complete without mentioning reusable grocery and produce bags. 

https://earth911.com/living-well-being/rethink-disposables-four-things-you-can-happily-live-without-at-home

There are a lot of suggestions for how to reduce your individual impact on the earth and live more sustainably.   However, some of these lists can be discouraging, because each person has a different set of circumstances in their life.    What works for your aunt or your co-worker may not work for you.  There are many practical reasons why many of us cannot or will not implement every sustainability suggestion we encounter.  For instance, this morning I read a list of things that people can do to live more sustainably.  At the top of the list was to live car-free.  I live in a small town near a metropolitan area.  The nearest public transportation is 10 miles away and serves only areas I seldom visit.  So, I try to combine trips when I use my car, shop close to home when I can, and focus on other sustainability actions that will work for me.   Another example: if you live in an apartment, you cannot add insulation to your home, but you can adjust your thermostat to use less energy.  Instead of feeling guilty about the things you aren’t doing, give yourself credit for what you are doing and keep your eyes open for more sustainability actions that work for you.  Every little bit adds up.  Thank you for what you do!

This TED talk from 2018 discusses the research and conclusions from Project Drawdown.  Drawdown is when concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere begin to decline on a year-to-year basis. The Project Drawdown organization has been evaluating a variety of solutions for both reducing CO2 emissions and removing CO2 from the atmosphere.  100 solutions are described in the book that summarizes their research and evaluation.  You really need to watch the video to get a good understanding of their work, but here are a few highlighted quotes from the video. 

• “We would want to implement these solutions whether or not global warming was even a problem, because they have cascading benefits to human and planetary well-being.” “When we implement these solutions, we shift the way we do business from a system that is inherently exploitative and extractive to a new normal that is by nature restorative and regenerative. We need to rethink our global goals, to move beyond sustainability towards regeneration, and along the way reverse global warming.”
• “What surprised us, honestly, was that eight of the top 20 relate to the food system. The climate impact of food may come as a surprise to many people, but what these results show is that the decisions we make every day about the food we produce, purchase and consume are perhaps the most important contributions every individual can make to reversing global warming.”
• “A plant-rich diet is not a vegan or a vegetarian diet, though I applaud any who make those choices.  It's a healthy diet in terms of how much we consume, and particularly how much meat is consumed. Moreover, approximately a third of all food produced is not eaten, and wasted food emits an astounding eight percent of global greenhouse gases.”
• “The single most impactful solution, according to this analysis, would be refrigeration management, or properly managing and disposing of hydrofluorocarbons, also known as HFCs, which are used by refrigerators and air conditioners to cool the air.”
• “Rooftop solar comes in ranked number 10.”

https://www.ted.com/talks/chad_frischmann_100_solutions_to_reverse_global_warming