10 Ways To Make Easter More Sustainable This Year (Because the Planet Is Dying and You're Out Here Buying Plastic Grass, You Absolute Goblin)
- Courtney Heard
- 1 hour ago
- 8 min read
Easter is the one holiday where we collectively decided to celebrate new life by absolutely murdering the planet with single-use plastic. It's like showing up to an AA meeting with a handle of Fireball. The energy is completely wrong and everyone can see it except you.
Every year, well over half of all Americans participate in Easter. Roughly 120 million pounds of packaging gets generated in a single weekend. This year, Easter spending is projected to hit a record-breaking 24.9 billion. Most of those purchases are wrapped in single use plastics. Fake grass made from petroleum takes 500 years to break down. Plastic eggs that will be fossilized artifacts when whatever civilization comes after ours digs through our landfills and tries to figure out what the hell happened to us. Individually-wrapped chalky candy that no one actually wants but somehow ends up in every basket like a Jehovah’s Witness at your door.
We celebrate spring, the literal return of life, renewal, the earth waking the hell back up, by hotgluing synthetic materials to wicker and stuffing it with garbage.
The cognitive dissonance is giving flat earther explains the moon landing.
I don't do the Jesus thing. The whole "died, three days in a cave, surprise resurrection" arc makes less narrative sense than anything from the final season of Game of Thrones, and I watched that whole disaster in real time. But spring? Rebirth? Chocolate and long weekends and watching kids absolutely lose their minds over hidden eggs in the backyard? That I can get behind. Easily.
What I cannot get behind is the disposable hellscape we've turned it into.
So here are 10 ways to do Easter without the ecological genocide. You're welcome. The tortugas thank you. Let's go.
1. Plastic Eggs Are a Hate Crime Against Your Bloodline
Every plastic Easter egg ever manufactured still exists somewhere on this planet right now.
Read that again.
Every single one.
They don't break down.
They don't disappear.
They crack in half, lose their mate like a MAGA dad, and end up in a storm drain or a landfill or the belly of a seabird who did not consent to eating your Target clearance aisle bric-a-brac.
What to do instead:
Hard boil real eggs. Dye them. Hide them. Eat them. Honestly, can’t even believe I have to tell you this.
We need paper mache eggs! Your kids paint them, they are biodegradable, they don't participate in oceanic genocide. This is not a complicated pivot. This is just being a person who thought for three seconds. Maybe your bloodline will carry on a few more generations instead of succumbing to the slow, agonizing death of being air fried by your own sun.
2. Easter Basket Grass Is Murder, Becky
I don't know who invented plastic Easter basket grass but I hope they stepped on every single piece of Lego in existence barefoot in the night for the rest of their life. It ends up everywhere. In the carpet. In the dog (and right back out of your dog in colourful piles in the backyard). In your bra somehow. In a Pacific Ocean garbage patch the size of Texas, slowly photodegrading into microplastics that are suffocating sea life and are now in your bloodstream whether you like it or not.
Use shredded recycled paper filler, grab it on Amazon here, or literally grab a handful of real straw from your neighbour’s barn like a person who has been outside before. Compostable. Free. Zero crimes committed. Revolutionary. You keep this up and you’ll overthrow the Trumpians in no time and maybe we’ll have a few more summers without needing gasmasks. Fuckin’ champ.
3. The Cheap Candy Situation Is Literally a Cry for Help
A basket full of individually-wrapped garbage candy is not abundance. It's thirty-seven separate pieces of plastic wrap destined for a landfill. And they’re wrapped around sugar and Red 40, designed to give your child the kind of blood sugar spike that ends with someone crying about not getting the Demon Hunter Funko Pop they need or their life would be over. And, of course, you’re left questioning every life choice that led to that moment.
Buy less candy but make it count. Tony's Chocolonely is ethically sourced, slave-labor-free chocolate that comes in minimal packaging and tastes like it was made by someone who actually gives a damn. Alter Eco truffles are organic, fair trade, and wrapped in compostable packaging. Your kids get better chocolate. The planet gets less trash. The polar bears get to breathe one more day. And you can climb up on your high horse, Miss Tree Hugger. You have every right to be there!
4. If You Buy One More Sticky Hand Toy I Will Find You
Easter basket filler toys are the physical manifestation of “I let a multinational corporation curate my child’s happiness while I dissociated.” A foam glider that breaks mid-flight. Three sticky hands that will end up fused to the ceiling surrounded by a halo of oil. A yo-yo that has never successfully yo-yo'd in the history of yo-yos. A tiny bottle of bubbles that will be empty or soaked into your favourite Levis within the hour.
This is not joy. Shame on you. You are an atheist, for Cheese’s sake. Get with it.
Wildflower seed bombs - you throw them in the dirt and flowers explode out of the ground. That is legitimately cooler than a sticky hand and you know it. A good book. A puzzle. A grow-your-own crystal kit. Things that do something instead of just existing to be thrown away. Come on. Stop with the turtle murder, you monster.
5. The Disposable Basket Is Your Annual $8 Donation to the Landfill
You buy it at Shopper’s on clearance in April for the Optimum points. It's pastel. It's already slightly falling apart in the parking lot. By May it's in the trash. Next year you do it again. You have done this every year since 2009 and I need you to understand that you are killing the kittens! Okay? It’s not just humans who perish when the greenhouse gases overtake us, KAREN. THE KITTENS DIE, TOO.
One good basket. Bought once. Used forever. A cotton rope basket, a solid canvas tote (this one is so cute it makes me want to barf), a well-made wicker that won't disintegrate if someone looks at it wrong. It becomes the basket: the one your kid remembers, the one you pull out every spring, the one that eventually becomes a memory instead of a landfill contribution.
You know, when your kid is an adult.
Which won’t happen if we fry the planet.
Logic. Get it in you.
6. Natural Egg Dyes or You're Dead to Me
Those little fizzy tablets in the cardboard PAAS kit? Petroleum-derived synthetic dyes. You're literally coloring eggs with oil byproducts and feeding them to your children and calling it a tradition. Total "we've always done it this way" energy and that phrase has never once in human history preceded a good idea.
Red cabbage = deep moody blue-purple. Turmeric = blazing sunrise yellow. Beet juice = full psychedelic magenta. Onion skins = a warm amber that looks ancient and beautiful. You have these things. You have a pot. You have water. You have everything you need to make eggs that look like they came from a witch's garden, in the best possible way.
Or grab a plant-based egg dye kit that's already done the math for you. Either way, zero petroleum products on your breakfast eggs, zero support for an industry that routinely causes ecological distasters, zero guilt on you when it all goes up in flames.
You're welcome.
7. Rethink The Egg Hunt, Nancy, It’s Not 1967
Stop hiding plastic eggs with candy.
I know it’s a shocking proposition, but parents, your kids will survive without consuming fictitious rabbit guts with no discernable nutritional value. Here’s what to do instead:
Hide hard boiled eggs. Just as fun. Just as colourful. And some kids seem to love a great HBE as much as they do a mini egg. And the best part, you’re not destroying anyone’s habitat for a few fleeting moments of cavity-inducing Easter joy.
Hide clues. Little notes, riddles, each one leading to the next, the whole thing ending with one real meaningful prize or experience: a trip somewhere, a book they've wanted, a donation to a cause they care about in their name. Kids are more engaged, more excited, more absolutely feral with joy when there's a puzzle involved than when there's just another egg to throw in a basket.
The Easter Bunny got smarter this year. The Easter Bunny reads. The Easter Bunny doesn't contribute to microplastic accumulation in freshwater systems. The Easter Bunny wants fish to continue to exist in 20 years. The Easter Bunny has grown.
8. Easter Dinner Doesn't Need to Come With A Side of Mass Extinction Events
The grocery store Easter ham situation is genuinely unhinged when you look directly at it. There’s often a styrofoam tray, plastic mesh, plastic wrap, cardboard box, more plastic. It’s like plastic-ception, like someone at the ham factory has a goddamned plastic kink. It's packaging inside packaging like a Russian nesting doll of environmental holocaust.
Buy local. Buy whole. Buy from a farmer's market if you can. One cut of meat from one local farm, in one piece of butcher paper. The packaging footprint drops by a lot. Cook it in a Lodge cast iron Dutch oven that will outlast your kids, your kids' kids, and whatever society rebuilds itself after ours. A one-time purchase. Zero waste. And you’re not setting fire to the Amazon to graze livestock for your meal. We may live to breathe another day!
9. Everything Turns To Shit (or Compost)
Easter morning leaves a debris field that looks like a piñata and a recycling bin worked their way through the Kama Sutra. Most households bag all of it: wrappers, eggshells, food scraps, cardboard. Then, they send it collectively to rot in a landfill where it'll produce methane for the next hundred years.
Sort it, or we'll be endangered. Cardboard: recycling. Eggshells and food scraps: compost. A countertop compost bin sits on your counter, doesn't stink if you manage it right, and eventually produces the most gorgeous dark rich garden soil you've ever seen. You're running a small soil factory from your kitchen. That's cool as hell. That's what you are now: a person who runs a soil factory.
When the AI wars hit, you’re going to be invaluable.
10. Slow Down, Jennifer, Sustainable Easter Has No Finish Line
The most radical sustainable choice you can make this Easter is the one that costs nothing and requires everything: put the cart down and actually show up.
The most sustainable Easter is one where the memory is the product. The dye-stained fingers. The egg hidden so well it's not found until June and everyone laughs. The bread you made from scratch, badly, together. The long walk after dinner when the light goes gold and nobody is looking at their phone.
Spring doesn't need your permission to arrive. It doesn't need a mythology. It doesn't need a man rising from a cave or a giant bunny with a basket fetish. The earth tilts. The days lengthen. Things that were dormant wake up. Life does its thing, indifferent to your beliefs, spectacular regardless.
That's the actual miracle, the one that happens every year, right on schedule, whether you're watching or not.
But I’d like to continue watching it. I would really love for my grandkids to be able to as well. So, let’s put some thought into our Easter purchases this year and maybe the planet won't purge humanity in one big mass extinction event driven by our own greed and ignorance.
What are some sustainable Easter tips I missed? Let me know in the comments!
