Enjoying the party season can be an expensive business. JEREMY CAMPBELL looks at the cost to the environment of all our over-indulgence and what we can do to help make savings.

Make this festive season a green one, by following some simple steps recommended by the Environment Agency in High Wycombe.

Whether its shopping for Christmas presents or the dinner, or cleaning up from your New Year celebrations, you can do your bit to cut down waste and create a better environment. Here is a guide on how to have a greener Christmas this year.

The Christmas feast
Imported ingredients for a typical Christmas dinner will have travelled over 24,000 miles, compared to the 376 miles travelled by similar ingredients bought at from local suppliers Buy food and wine locally try your local farmers' market. If you buy food that way you save on transport costs, and the produce is likely to be fresher, too.

The distance food has travels from field to fork makes a significant contribution to climate change with carbon dioxide emissions from international sea and air travel.

Try meats from sustainable farms and support sustainable farming practices such as Linking Environment and Farming (LEAF). By doing so you can help to improve the countryside and reward farmers who do their best to add value to the environment, by reducing nutrient sediment and pesticides and keeping water supplies clean.

Christmas waste
Households will produce approximately 160,000 tonnes of food waste this Christmas that's the equivalent of an extra bin bag of leftovers and peelings for every UK home.

Try to minimise your food waste. Just by confirming how many people you're cooking for you can cut down on waste by buying only what you need.

Put your fruit and vegetable peelings into your compost bin and avoid serving up large quantities of perishable food cold meats, cheese, bread and salads if they stay in the fridge they won't need to be thrown out.

Up to one billion Christmas cards could end up in bins across the UK. Send a recycled card if you can. Remember don't throw them away when Christmas is over recycle them.

Check out WRAP (www. wrap. org.uk) for more information about recycling programmes and ideas for paper, plastics, glass and wood.

Make your own decorations. Reuse household waste materials such as brown paper, newspaper, coloured magazines or foil.

An extra 750million bottles and glass containers and 500million aluminum and steel drink cans are used over Christmas. Store your cans, glass bottles and jars until the new year, and then take them to be recycled.

Over six million trees were bought last Christmas in the UK, most of which were thrown out after December, creating over 9,000 tonnes of additional rubbish. Buy a tree with roots so it can grow again. If you can't buy a tree with roots, get your old one shredded and turned into compost.

Christmas presents
Choose gifts from fashion accessories to homewares that are made from recycled or reclaimed materials. It's worth looking at those from Recycle Now and leading designer Oliver Heath at www.recyclenow.com. Or promote the old buy antiques or household things from reclamation yards and auctions.

Use string to secure your wrapped presents so that the paper can be reused. As much as 83 square km of wrapping paper and 125,000 tonnes of plastic packaging will end up in UK rubbish bins this Christmas.