How to ethically get

Here’s what you do: Instead of chucking everything from the lounge floor into a black trash bag and calling it a day, get organised. ‘‘Take a couple of moments to separate it out,’’ says The Rubbish Trip’s Hannah Blumhardt.

Make piles with your paper, remove stickers or tape so you can recycle uncoated paper that’s not too badly ripped and reuse paper that’s still got another Christmas in it. Foil and ‘‘plastic’’ papers can’t be recycled, they need to go in the bin or get reused next year. ‘‘Sorting rubbish can be a massive job if you don’t tell guests what rubbish goes in where,’’ says eco blogger Kate Hall.

She suggests setting up labelled waste bins: recycling, compost, and landfill. Label landfill with red. If you’re based in Auckland, Hamilton, or Wellington, you can add a fourth bin for soft plastics like food wrappers and plastic bags, anything that can be scrunched in your hand.

And if in doubt, check in with a site like the Auckland Council’s How To Deal With Unwanted Items checker. Just plug in the thing you want to get rid of and it’ll tell you if it’s recyclable or not.

‘‘If you don’t know if something can be recycled, put it in landfill so you don’t contaminate another bin,’’ says Hall.

It’s a sad fact that some things just cannot be reused, recycled, or in any way useful, once they’ve served their original purpose.

Plastic packaging and polystyrene packing on kids’ toys can’t be recycled, so unfortunately it’s straight into landfill with that stuff.

Beware of ‘‘wishcycling’’ – that’s where you put things in the recycling bin because you hope and wish they could be recycled, but don’t know for sure if they can or not. When in doubt, put it in the landfill and deal with the guilt by making a solemn and binding vow never to buy anything like it again.

For more information on how to prepare your recycling for collection, check out council info pages like Wellington City Council’s Rubbish and Recycling page.

Let’s talk about the itty bitty pretty elephant in the room: Glitter.

I love the stuff. I have glitter shoes, glitter handbags and glitter lipstick. I would have glitter undies, if they made such a thing, because it’s so dang cute.

In fact, I’m pretty sure part of why I’m nuts-o about Christmas is that ’tis the season to go completely overboard with the spangle. But I’m giving up my glitter habit, because sparkly though it is, that stuff is 100 per cent noxious crud.

In fact, some experts say glitter is just as bad as the micro beads former environment minister Nick Smith banned in cosmetics in 2017.

Speaking to Stuff in 2017, social anthropologist at Massey University Trisia Farrelly said, made from plastic, aluminium and polyethylene terephtalate (PET), glitter could leach endocrine disrupting chemicals into the water. I don’t want my endocrine disrupted and neither do you.

Also, ‘‘[glitter is] really tiny and gets into everything’’.

This goes for tinsel and old plastic Christmas trees, too. And none of that stuff is recyclable. The only way forward is to stop buying the stuff so stores eventually stop stocking it and producers eventually stop making it.

Fairy lights, reason No 2 why I love the season, are everywhere right now. I even wrote a list of the best on offer around the shops at the moment. I have several strands and they’re great, as long as they’re working.

Unfortunately, once they break they are next to useless.

They can’t be recycled – nothing with a battery pack or solar panel (for the outdoor lights) can go in the ordinary recycling.

So it’s either landfill for them, or you can drop them in at your local tip store, where some amateur boffin will fix them, use them in an art installation, or find some new and exciting use for them.

Even though they can be very cheap, it’s important to treat them as if they cost the whole planet, because, well, they kind of do. Treat them well and make sure they last as long as possible.