Have you ever wondered about Santa’s carbon footprint? All that flying around the globe to deliver presents. Well, maybe not, but clever people from event:decision have thought about it. Our sustainability expert Sarah Walkley has a look at what they found…

Every Christmas, Santa has to deliver presents to about 2 billion children. If there are 2.5 children per household on average (because some families are bigger and some are smaller), then that means he has to go to 800 million homes in just one night.

Mapping the shortest route that he needs to take from house to house, he has to fly 99 million miles, or 160 million kilometres, in a night. That’s nearly 4,000 times around the world!

If he were to have an economy seat on a Boeing 747, emissions from his flight would be 18,400 tonnes of CO2e.

But, of course, Santa’s sleigh is magical. How else would he be able to deliver all the presents? Even making the best use of the time differences across the globe, he only has about 34 hours to deliver presents. That means he has to travel very fast and might emit more than estimated. Or it might be less, because we all know that reindeer are powered on carrots.

It isn’t all about the delivery. Santa lives at the North Pole where it is very cold. He has to heat his house and workshop all year, so that he can comfortably make all the presents to be delivered. So that adds about 10 tonnes of CO2e.

The elves are environmentally conscious, and they try to make presents from recycled materials wherever possible and plant a new tree whenever they have to cut one down to make toys. And they love to see children playing together and sharing their games and presents with their brothers and sisters. Or passing on toys when children have grown out of them. Even so, the specialists estimate Santa uses about 1,600 tonnes of CO2e to make presents.

So that brings us to a grand total of 22,000 tonnes CO2e. That might seem like a lot, but it is only about 10g for every child, or the equivalent of 20g of broccoli (or about one-third of a typical serving). And once a year, wouldn’t we all prefer to have presents rather than broccoli?

Sarah Walkley is a freelance writer and researcher on a mission to empower everyone to play their part in addressing climate change and nature loss.

She set up Purplefully to help organisations develop their sustainability strategy and communication.