Gift Wrapping Tips for a Sustainable Holiday Season!
Written by Jeeyanshi Gupta, Sustainability Committee member
With the holidays approaching, the paper waste from gift wrapping usually skyrockets! A considerable amount of waste is produced due to the excitement of the festive season, or maybe due to the convenience of conventional gift wrapping. A staggering 540,000 tons of waste is produced by Canada alone with waste from shopping bags and wrapping materials. This ends up impacting our environment adversely. Landfills start to overflow, and the plastic wrapping paper takes decades if not more to break down, or worse it gets into the oceans and harms marine animals. And so, this year why not put in a tiny bit of effort to make some fun and sustainable wrapped gifts, to make this season more eco-friendly. Below are some ideas to be less wasteful and utilize the materials we all have lying around!
Use other forms of used/spare paper: Old newspapers, magazines, brown paper bags, or even old wrapping paper would be great ways to reuse what we already have and reduce over-consumption and the waste that follows. You could be creative with this as well, by mixing and matching different types of paper, or painting and drawing some designs onto it, and lastly adding a cute ribbon bow to top it off!
The way the Japanese do it:) A practice called Furoshiki in Japan encourages the art of fabric wrapping. People often use old scarves or clothes to wrap gifts up. With a little upscaling of the fabric, which would be through just cutting it into the desirable size, and shape or even adding more elements to it, your gifts could look super cute and elegant, while also being sustainable.
Shoe boxes/packaged boxes and old jars: A great way to reuse Amazon cardboard boxes or shoe boxes would be to give your loved ones some gifts in it! You can make is personalized with some colors and paints. There are usually numerous sizes and hence should fit different types of gifts, and most importantly you will be reducing waste by reusing materials already present in your home and circling it in your community.
Avoiding tape would be extremely beneficial for the environment as it is not recyclable so using other forms, like ribbons or yarn could be both pretty and sustainable.
Use reusable gift bags! Aside from buying your groceries with this, you can use the extra ones, or the damaged ones for gift-giving.
Use nature to make your gift pretty! Pinecones, cool-shaped leaves, different-colored flowers are all great ways of using your surroundings to spice up this holiday season.