For those who celebrate Christmas, it's time
to start wrapping Christmas gifts!
Consumers in the UK use 227,000 miles of wrapping paper each year.(Statistic from the Rubbish Project on Twitter).
My family has always reused Christmas
wrapping paper when giving gifts within the close family. However, people
outside the close family, unless they're keen on recycling themselves,
may be less than impressed by obviously reused paper. So how about some
more imaginative ways to reuse paper in eye-catching ways? These are examples of fancy reused wrapping I've used in previous years:
For
this first one, I reused green and white tissue paper, covered the
join with green ribbon and then added a gift tag (recycled from a
greetings card!) in matching colours.
The second uses two different reused
wrapping papers, a contrasting ribbon to cover the join and a gift tag
made using wrapping paper glued onto recycled card.
Other ideas to reduce the environmental impact of Christmas wrapping, include sending gifts that don't need to be wrapped (for example buying a virtual gift from a charity - see, for example, this selection from the People's Trust for Endangered Species); wrapping in colourful pages of old magazines or newspapers or wrapping in cloth.
Most sticky tape includes plastic so to avoid this you can use twine or ribbon to tie up your gifts. I have to admit though I've never been able to tie up gifts in a way that looks either aesthetically pleasing or secure. Luckily, I've been able to source plastic free sticky tape in the past couple of years and use that instead.
There's an article about greening Christmas cards and wrapping on the Guardian newspaper website here.
3 comments:
I used sheets of the Guardian newspaper one year, with Holly leaves and berries drawn all over them with markers. I thought they looked good but I haven't been encouraged to repeat the exercise.
Brilliant Juliet! We should all be doing what we can. We always used to use the Sunday comic strip pages to wrap as many children's gifts as possible (probably started because we didn't have any wrapping paper, but continued over the years on purpose). Alas the comics only come on line now and that wouldn't work worth a darn!
Hi Carruthers, that sounds like a good option! May not be appreciated by readers of other newspapers though!
Sallie - comic strips make great wrapping paper.
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