5 ways to stay slaughtered and sustainable this New Year’s Eve
We’ve done it, everyone, well done! Today marks the last day of 2019, and I can’t tell if I’m excited or already anxious about what 2020 will bring. Nonetheless, I hope your year has been filled with success, happiness and sustainability (a whole lot of it). This year, the call for a sustainable way of life was stronger than ever, and hopefully it will continue to grow in 2020.
While we welcome and celebrate the new year tonight, let’s forget about our worries and the future—only one main thing should stay on our minds and lead our actions during that evening: enjoying a sustainable sesh. And while I know being both slaughtered and sustainable this New Year’s Eve sounds almost undoable, here are 5 tips to help you achieve this goal, so you can start 2020 in the best of mindsets.
1. It’s all about the garms, baby
Along with the new year’s celebrations comes the mission of finding the perfect outfit for the night—something cute and trendy, sexy for some, chic for others. Whatever your style is, whatever you are planning on doing tonight, whether you are staying in for a dinner party or going out because you’re a slave to the sesh, we all want one thing: to look good for the many pictures that will undoubtedly inundate Instagram on 1 January 2020.
But for you to properly end 2019 on a good note, you can’t be doing so wearing a glittery outfit from PrettyLittleThing or any other fast fashion brand that has such a negative impact on our environment. Instead, try to think sustainably and borrow that bomb outfit from your one friend that has nicer garms than you. Try to avoid buying a brand new outfit just for New Year’s Eve, but if you really feel like you have to, and if you’re confident you will wear it again and again, shop from environmentally-friendly options such as vintage and charity shops, Depop, House of Sunny or even from rental fashion companies.
Also, keep away from the non-biodegradable glitters and all the tacky headwears that people wear on New Year’s Eve. They’re awful for the environment, and, let’s be honest, they’re never a good look when you’re already looking like a hot mess at the end of the party.
2. Travel sustainably, no matter where the party’s at
If you’ve already flown away to welcome 2020 in a warmer country than the UK, this is a first time warning—next year, try to travel consciously. For the rest of you that stayed in the country, use public transport. “Why should I use the tube tonight, when everyone else is going to do the same thing and I am probably going to be stuck with drunk people yelling on the central line for 20 minutes?” I can hear you wonder.
First of all, if you live in London, the tube, buses, DLR and Overground are all free that night and up until 4:30 on New Year’s Day, so don’t forget to take your Oyster card for your journey home from the rave. Furthermore, using public transport is safer on top of being greener. Each year, the majority of drunk driving accidents happen during this time of the year.
If you really have to use Uber, remember to split the journey with friends, or order an Uber Pool. Enjoy the 4x surge price while you’re at it.
3. You might not drink responsibly, but drink sustainably
I’m not here to tell you how much you should or should not drink, and I am the last one to judge. This New Year’s Eve, most of us will end up drinking too much, but to make you feel a tiny bit better, you should at least drink sustainable, UK-produced spirits and vinos that taste as good as the bottle of Disaronno you downed during Christmas.
For my vodka fans out there, try the Black Cow Vodka made in West Dorset with a zero-waste ethos, using only one ingredient—leftover whey from grass-fed cow’s milk. Are you more of a whiskey and gin kind of drinker? Ncn’ean Botanical Spirit is the first product from the first whisky distillery in Scotland to be 100 per cent organic and sustainable. My point is, there are a lot of eco-friendly alcoholic beverages out there, from spirits and beers to eco wines, so let’s make boycotting unsustainable drinks our first resolution of 2020.
4. Don’t do drugs (that are not ethically sourced)
In the UK, according to a crime survey for England and Wales, cocaine was used by an estimated 875,000 people between 2017 and 2018. This is the highest number in a decade and a 15 per cent year-on-year rise. So, yes, drugs are bad, but they’re also very much in demand, especially for New Year’s Eve.
If you have to get high tonight, just to come to terms with 2019, try to stick to ethically-grown weed, mushrooms, LSD, or even ketamine instead of cocaine. But if you can’t resist getting a few baggies to celebrate the new decade, well, at least make sure your dealer is doing his absolute best to reduce his environmental impact. As ridiculous as it sounds, eco-friendly drug dealers are now packaging cocaine and ketamine in reusable containers for customers concerned about the environment—that’s you my friend.
5. Finish it off with eco-friendly fireworks
If you ask me, we should not have any kind of fireworks, ever. But it is my role to be as open-minded with them as I have just been with alcohol and drugs. Traditional fireworks are made using a charcoal and sulphur fuel, a perchlorate oxidiser to keep them burning, and colourants and propellants on top of that. When ignited, they look spectacular, but so is the environmental impact of the smoke they emit. That’s why environmentally-friendly fireworks have been developed to reduce the amount of atmospheric pollution produced.
Eco-friendly fireworks have a clean burning, nitrogen-based fuel that emit very little smoke and still produce highly coloured flames. If you’re looking up at the incredible firework display in the sky tonight, take a moment to think about the effect it is having on the atmosphere. And look at it this way, if you use eco-friendly fireworks, you will definitely feel better about that 80 quid baggy in your pocket.
Tonight, remember to stay safe, slaughtered and sustainable. And happy new year!
