Celebrate Green Blog

Pre-holiday

• Wrap in fabric – you can buy authentic wraps from www.bobowrap.com, www.furoshic.com or www.chewingthecud.com or just use scarves, cut sheets, table cloths – whatever. Think of it as a gift within a gift! Kids have fun with this – it’s like origami with cloth! So quick and easy to wrap, Lynn can even do it with her eyes closed (a hint to why we were laughing, below).
• Wrap in any paper you have lying around: kids’ artwork, maps, architectural plans, calendar pages, comics, catalog pages, etc.
• If you are going to buy, look for 100% recycled or tree-free (such as hemp) or buy plantable paper (100% recycled embedded with seeds that grow wild flowers or herbs). Or buy a roll of 100% recycled butcher paper and stamp, paint or draw on it.
• For ribbons and bows – use previously used or go au ntural with raffia, silk, cotton or sinamay. Or go upcycled with this ribbon made from a Clif Bar wrapper or make your own.
• Give gifts in a reusable shopping bag or saved wrapping paper (see note for post-holiday, below).
• Don’t wrap gifts at all – hide them. Clues, blindfolds and/or “hot and cold” are optional but all add to the fun.

Post-holiday

• Save all gift wrap, gift bags, tissue paper, ribbons and bows for future use. Paper that has been ripped can be cut into gift cards or gift tags. Tissue paper that’s too wrinkled can be used for crafts.
• Or recycle wrap in recycle bin. NOTE: metallic paper cannot be recycled.
• Make a New Year’s resolution to “Just Say No” to gift wrap made from virgin trees and ribbon & bows from unsustainable, non-biodegradable plastic.

Who knew wrapping green could be so… funny?

Watch our video on Mothering.com to see why we’re still LOL.

Green wrapping resources

• Cloth wraps from BoboWrap, Furochic and aToyGarden (playsilks). Or make your own from fabric remnants, sheets, clothes, scarves, receiving blankets, etc.
• Books on how to wrap gifts with fabric: Wrapagami, The Wrapping Scarf Revolution and of course, Celebrate Green! Creating Eco-Savvy Holidays, Celebrations and Traditions for the Whole Family.
• 100% recycled content wrapping paper from EcoJot.
• Plantable wrapping paper from Plantable Papers
• Tree-free wrapping paper from Mr. Ellie Pooh
• Cloth gift bags from Ecorations and Green Wrapz

Did you know?

• Gift wrap is a 2.6 billion dollar industry
• According to Bob Lilienfeld and our friends at the Use Less Stuff Report, if every American wrapped just three fewer gifts in something other than paper, we’d save 47,000 football fields worth of paper
• If all of us used just two feet less of ribbon to wrap gifts each year, the 38,000 miles of ribbon saved could tie a bow around the Earth
• According to the Clean Air Council, in the US, wrapping paper and shopping bags account for an extra 4 million tons of waste each year