Matt Davenport:

Welcome to the Michigan Minds Podcast, where we explore the wealth of knowledge from faculty experts at the University of Michigan. I’m Matt Davenport, a science writer and public relations representative with Michigan News. We are in the thick of the holiday season, and for many of us, that means we’ll be doing more of a lot of things. We’re giving more gifts this time of year. We’re traveling more to see friends and family and eating and drinking more as part of the celebrations. As we get more festive though, a lot of people also have questions about how we can do that more sustainably. That’s why we’ve asked Shelie Miller to answer some of those questions. She is the Jonathan W. Bulkley Collegiate Professor of Sustainable Systems in the School for Environment and Sustainability, as well as the co-director of U of M’s Center for Sustainable Systems. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Shelie Miller:

I’m excited to be here. Thanks so much for the invitation.

Matt Davenport:

Absolutely. So, this is our first time podcasting together, but not our first time talking about your work. And one of the things that stuck out to me from those conversations is sometimes the things we think about most in terms of having a big impact on our choices and sustainability end up not mattering as much, or conversely, the things we don’t think about as much have a pretty big impact. I’m curious, are there any examples of that that come to mind when thinking about the holiday season?

Shelie Miller:

Yeah, absolutely. And this is a great question because people are always really interested in how to reduce their environmental impact. And they ask me these things all the time. And whenever holidays come up or special occasions, there’s lots of questions people have. And we can get into the nitty-gritty details about specific choices and things that can happen. But when we take a step back, there’s three things that always matter most. And that’s true in the holidays and it’s true throughout life. The big things that affect your environmental impact are food, transportation and home energy use. If you tackle those three things, both at the holidays and throughout the year, you’re well ahead of the game environmentally speaking. We can talk about individual product choices, things that are better than the other, when one thing is slightly better than the other, and those are great and they’re great things to do. But the big things, the ones to always go back to, food, transportation and home energy, and all of those things factor in pretty well in the holidays.

Matt Davenport:

So, one thing I’m also very curious about, as a professor who studies sustainability, when you celebrate the holidays, do you have a sense for how those celebrations may or may not look different from people’s own experiences or what people see on TV and movies at this time of year?

Shelie Miller:

Yeah. So, I think it’s important to note that everybody’s going to have different celebrations and everyone’s going to look slightly different this time of year and no one wants to be an environmental scrooge. I mean, this is time for celebration, this is time for traditions, this is time for being with people that you love and things that matter. And so, what I try to do in my celebrations is really focus on relationships with people, really trying to figure out connecting with greater things, whether it’s community, whether it’s faith-based or spirituality, whether it’s just generally trying to connect broader. So, I will say, I’m an engineer. I’m not a behavioral scientist, but I talk a lot about how people adopt products. And so, one of the things that you really see in the happiness literature is what brings people joy, what brings people happiness? It’s not stuff.

It’s never about stuff. What it is, it’s about forming relationships, strengthening relationships and forming connectivity beyond ourselves. And that’s really true in the spirit of the holiday season. It’s certainly how I try to approach the holidays of trying to figure out, rather than focus on the trappings of the season, how do we actually really find the things that matter, find the things that stress us out that we don’t necessarily love? I personally hate malls and you’re never going to see me in a shopping mall. But for other people, that is really how they connect. That is really how they get together. And so, everyone’s going to be slightly different. In many ways, it’s about taking a step back, finding what brings you joy, and then just doing the best you can.

Matt Davenport:

All right. You had mentioned we’ll have an opportunity to get into some of the nitty-gritty specifics, and I want to start with that, but maybe something a little tangential from what maybe people were expecting right away. And that’s something that always makes me feel good personally, but I don’t know what it actually does. And that’s when you buy a plane ticket to travel or you’re having a gift shipped, oftentimes there’s an option to pay a small additional fee to offset the carbon emissions. Again, that makes me feel good, but I don’t know what it does. Do you know how that works? What does it do?

Shelie Miller:

Yeah. So, these are called carbon offsets and they can take lots of different forms. And so, just like you say, they are investments in some sort of carbon-based solution. So, it is intended to at least help offset the carbon impacts of travel or any other activity. And as we’ve mentioned, travel really is one of the most environmentally intensive things that we do, particularly if you’re getting on an airplane. There’s lots of great reasons to get on an airplane, but then folks are often trying to figure out like, “Okay, I want to at least offset this in some way.” And carbon offsets allow you at least some way of indicating that you care that you notice and that you are trying to actually reduce your impact. In practice, in reality, carbon offsets aren’t always as great as promised. Different companies have different profiles and probably way too detailed to get into in this venue, but it’s usually not a one-to-one.

You’re usually not going to be able to say, “Oh, I can get on whatever flights that I want and I’ll just buy carbon offsets and then oh, that travel is completely blameless.” Unfortunately, that’s not usually the case, but one of the things you are doing is signaling to the airlines, signaling to companies that you do care about the environment, that you are looking to reduce environmental emissions, and that in and of itself can be a signal and have an impact.

Matt Davenport:

So, I’m okay feeling good, but not, like you said, thinking it’s a one-to-one offset.

Shelie Miller:

Right, exactly. So, it’s one of those things that we’re never going to erase our environmental impacts. Burning gasoline, burning jet fuel, all of that does create an environmental impact. There are ways to reduce that environmental impact. We can fund projects to reforest the Amazon. We can fund projects that do things that store carbon in soils. All of those things are great things to do that we do need to invest in, but it’s probably not going to erase the environmental impact of your travel.

Matt Davenport:

All right. Another item that we touched on briefly earlier was wrapping and packaging. So, I celebrate Christmas with my family and it’s always a wonderful time until the very end. And you’re left with the bags full of the discarded paper and packaging and I do feel bad about that. And so, I’m curious, this is a two part question. The first part is sort of the technological or the materials question is, are there certain types of wrapping paper, packaging that would maybe have a lower impact?

Shelie Miller:

Yeah. So, it is. It’s one of those things that holidays are there for abundance. And if you’re talking about a Christmastime celebration with lots of presents under the tree, you’re going to end up with a lot of stuff to deal with a few days later. And you’re going to have to put that in recycling or in the garbage and you have to actually deal with that. And so, there’s definitely ways to reduce those environmental impacts. The biggest thing to remember though is that it’s the thing inside the package that’s always going to matter more than the packaging itself. And so, whatever you’re buying and putting under the tree, that’s going to have the largest environmental impact. Thinking about that first is key. But then of course, like I said, holiday celebrations are important. They have traditions. We want to be able to celebrate. We want to give gifts.

And so then it goes down to the idea of, can we at least reduce the impacts of packaging? And so, there’s a couple of things that of course you can do, and it goes back to our three Rs that most of us have had since elementary school, right? Reduce, reuse, recycle, and that is exactly in order. And so when you’re thinking about trying to reduce the impacts of holiday packaging, first think about reducing. Does this need a brand new box to put it in? Could I actually just get away with, maybe you sloppily wrap something in paper rather than put it in a brand new box? But so thinking through, are there ways to reduce? Next, reuse. So, maybe it does need a box and you already have something from Amazon or something like that—something around the house that you can reuse. Brown paper packaging from stores, you get paper instead of plastic bags.

Then you can reuse those as sort of a holiday wrapping that you can theme up and spruce up with plants or something like that. And then of course recycle. And so recycling is really thinking through any packaging that you have if it can be recycled. And so when we’re talking about holiday wrapping paper, that’s usually buying sort of more plain wrapping paper that’s accepted by your recycling facility. Every recycling facility is different, but many will accept colored paper, but won’t necessarily accept any sort of metallic wrapping. So, things like the really pretty metallic wrappers probably can’t go in the recycling.

Matt Davenport:

And you touched on this too in that answer where there is this tradition, the sense of tradition, right? And there’s a cultural and social element to this. And it reminds me of a chance we had to talk about recent research with clothes drying of all things, where I learned that using dryers is a pretty unique American thing. A lot of the rest of the world is line drying, which compared to using your clothes dryer, especially, low energy costs and low carbon emissions because you’re not producing energy to run it. And so, we talked then about the idea of going completely from drying to line drying for some people, myself included, is a pretty big leap, but there’s smaller behavioral things that people can do such as running the dryer at off-peak times, like nighttime hours when there’s not as much demand for the electricity, or doing less laundry, which, as a parent, is really appealing.

So, I’m curious, when it comes to gift giving and the sense of tradition and this thing that we’ve always done, are there smaller entry points where maybe it’s not giving up giving the gifts cold turkey, but smaller things we can do to have an impact without taking that big leap?

Shelie Miller:

Absolutely. Yeah. So, there’s plenty of things that we can do to reduce environmental impact and it never has to be all or nothing. There’s always smaller steps that we can do to be able to say, “All right, we still want to keep our traditions. We still want to keep the things that are really important to us, but then there’s other things that may not matter as much or can be somewhat easy to do that we can still have an environmental improvement.” And so, I always go back again to the three major things—food, energy, transportation—fand trying to think, “Okay, are there ways that I can reduce those?” And again, some of it is just taking a step back and trying to think about what brings you joy and what brings you stress. If you have a Christmas list that’s 40 deep, does that bring you happiness? Do those people even want that?

Just trying to think through, “Okay, can I minimize in ways that actually makes things easier for me?” That can be one of the first things to do. And so maybe that checks some of the items off your Christmas list. Another thing to do is thinking about when we’re trying to think about things that make people happy, being together can be one of those great things. So rather than thinking about things, you can think about experiences. Can you take a class together? Can you figure out ways to bring people together that aren’t necessarily centered on buying things? And then of course there’s the celebration itself, right? So, one of the big things, particularly around the holidays, is food waste. Food waste is one of those things that is so much of a behavioral issue. Much of the food that we grow in the United States goes to waste and holiday celebrations, that is absolutely the case.

There’s some estimates that say 200 million pounds of turkey get thrown out at Thanksgiving after celebrations. That’s a lot of environmental waste. And so, thinking through things of planning ahead for leftovers or we often like to think about these abundant feasts. Some of the things we really do want and we want to keep and we want traditions to stay alive. And sometimes maybe there’s ways of thinking about food waste and celebrations that can minimize environmental impact that isn’t just changing what our celebrations look like, but being a little bit more thoughtful of how we use our resources.

Matt Davenport:

In preparing for this interview, you let me know that one of the most common questions you get around this time of the year is the real Christmas tree or artificial Christmas tree question. Where does sustainability science come down in that argument?

Shelie Miller:

Oh, that’s always a question that comes up. “What kind of tree should I buy?” And so, this is again, there are things that really, really matter environmentally. There are things that matter a whole lot less. When you talk about the difference between a real Christmas tree and an artificial tree, you’re usually talking about 10 pounds of carbon emissions per year. And that can be a decision, but most of us create 33,000 pounds or 15 metric tons per year of carbon emissions. When you’re talking about the idea between a real or a fake Christmas tree, 10 pounds is probably not that big of a deal. And so these are what I call green herrings, right? So, green herrings are things where you can spend a lot of time and energy worried about whether one thing is better than the other, but in the scheme of things, they probably don’t matter all that much.

Now, there is an answer that is going to be better, and so it does depend on what you already do though. And so, when you’re talking about Christmas trees specifically, if you already have an artificial tree, reduce, reuse, recycle, right? Reusing that tree for as long as you possibly can is the best option. If you’re starting from scratch and you don’t have a tree at all and you’re trying to debate between an artificial tree and a real tree, the real tree is probably the better option, but again, that environmental improvement is small. And so it really goes back to do what makes sense for your celebration and the things that bring you joy.

Matt Davenport:

Are there other questions that you get a lot, especially this time of year that we haven’t talked about that might be on the minds of our listeners?

Shelie Miller:

Yeah. I mean, I think it really comes down to really trying to think through like, what’s important? How can I really contribute? And also, how do I not stress myself out? And that stress is a big deal these days. So, it’s important not to be environmentally stressed, right? I would say bigger things to be thinking about in addition to holiday food, trying not to waste food, making your house really cozy for this time of year, right? And so that can include making sure there’s no drafts. It’s one of those things where that’s a big thing environmentally, but like actually having a nice cozy house to come home to. Sealing up those drafts as you’re putting up Christmas lights can be a huge way of improving your holiday. I’d also say making sure that if you are traveling, making sure to turn down your thermostat while you do, it’ll save you money, but it’ll also reduce the environmental impacts of home energy. And of course, trying to reduce travel as it makes sense, but it is a time of celebration.

Matt Davenport:

I just got my front door insulated and there’s just something so satisfying about not being cold when I walk by the front door.

Shelie Miller:

Your life is better because of it, right?

Matt Davenport:

Yes.

Shelie Miller:

And it’s not necessarily about how much heat is escaping, right? And that is an environmental issue, but it just feels good to have that not feel that draft. And so again, I think there’s two sides. There’s one side that folks aren’t necessarily thinking about the environment and their decisions, and there’s ways of tackling that in lots of ways, but that there are also people who spend so much time obsessing and feeling guilty about every environmental decision, and that can be great, but it can also be a burden. And so really taking a step back, thinking about the things that are really going to have an impact and the things that you can probably let go and let yourself off the hook of can be really helpful when approaching environmental sustainability.

Matt Davenport:

So, stepping back from the holidays for a second, one of the things that’s been really fun to work with you on is answering a lot of questions that just people have, right? That your research seems to be inspired by questions that regular people are asking. Do you have a favorite?

Shelie Miller:

Oh, as far as a favorite environmental question?

Matt Davenport:

Yeah.

Shelie Miller:

Yeah. So, this is one that I bring up a lot is… So, a lot of times people are really worried about packaging, right? And that actually is one of the things that I focus on a lot, is packaging. So, if I’m trying to cook beans from scratch, is it better to have dried beans or is it better to have canned beans? And you can go down these rabbit holes of really trying to figure out what’s better for the environment and what isn’t. And those are really actually complex questions where you say, “Oh, well, the dried beans, they come in plastic, but there’s more of them per package, but then there’s the metal of the can and it’s been prepackaged and pre-processed and there’s less and they’re heavier and they probably cost more to transport.” And then which is going to be better and which is going to be worse and you can tear your hair out doing it.

And that is what my research group does. I send students out and we try to figure out all of those complex questions. And again, there’s things to worry about and there’s things to not be as concerned about. And again, this is where I come into this concept of green herrings, of not being so stressed out about these little tiny decisions when there’s the big decisions out there. And again, the big decisions always come down to food, home energy, and transportation. I’ve said it once, I’ll say it a thousand times in our interviews together, like I can guarantee it, but those are the big things to focus on. And so if you take a step back and if you really are like all of us, let’s face it, we have limited decision making, we have limited capacity. We can focus on the things that matter, the things that are going to have the biggest improvement and not worry so much about how we package our beans.

Matt Davenport:

We talked about how a lot of people are asking these questions. Do you have a sense, though, for how common or how willing people are in general to take on, I don’t want to call it a burden, but this extra thinking of being more environmentally conscious?

Shelie Miller:

Yeah. I mean, well, granted, a lot of the people who are asking me questions are a little bit of a selective group, as probably are some of the people who are hearing this podcast right now is my guess. But I think a lot of times, especially when we start thinking about mindful consumption, when we start thinking about really prioritizing the things that we value, a lot of the environmental choices are actually choices that we may want to do anyway. So, there are things that will save us money. There are things that, like I said, making your house cozy can be… It may not be a great way to spend a Saturday putting up weather stripping, but that will save money in the long term. And so, there’s plenty of ways to get at it that aren’t necessarily environmental. And again, it’s not a one-size-fits-all, it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. We try to figure out what we can do while still living the lives that we want to live.

Matt Davenport:

So, again, you’ve already given us the disclaimer that you are an engineer, not a behavioral scientist, but it was awesome to hear you talk about just not getting bogged down on things that stress you out. Do you have any strategies that work for you when you are feeling stressed or having to decide if something’s worth it?

Shelie Miller:

Oh, Matt, of course I never get stressed out. My life is nothing but breezy. It’s absolutely great. No, I mean, I think it really goes back to taking a step back and our lives are hectic. Our lives are difficult, right? And so, it really comes down to, I am an environmental engineer and I am not perfect. I study these things for a living and certainly I have things that I can improve on. I’m constantly trying to improve. I’m constantly trying to figure out how to reduce environmental impact, but it can happen small steps at a time. And so, we can think about things in terms of one of the other holidays that’s coming up is, of course, New Year’s. And so thinking about New Year’s resolutions and including environmental resolutions in your New Year’s celebrations, think about an environmental challenge. One of the things that I do pretty much every year is a buy nothing January.

And so, as a great way to decompress for the holidays, it can be great for both your credit card balance, but also your stress levels of saying, “Hey, let’s just be appreciative of the things that we have. Let’s try to take a step back. Let’s reduce impact and let’s really take a sense of what we really value.” And again, it tends to be community, it tends to be people. That may work for some people, it may not work for others, but there’s plenty of ways, especially heading into the new year, that you can think about ways that you might want to reduce your environmental impact this next year.

Matt Davenport:

Well, that’s excellent advice. Thank you so much for joining us today. This has been a really fun conversation.

Shelie Miller:

It’s been a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.

Matt Davenport:

Thank you for listening to this episode of Michigan Minds produced by Michigan News, a division of the university’s Office of the Vice President for Communications.