With Christmas just around the corner, stores are being flooded in the rush to purchase Christmas gifts. With the purchasing of gifts comes the wrapping, and inevitably you will find wrapping stands outside of stores to make it irresistible. And is anyone to blame? It is almost necessary to complete the image of Christmas: the beautifully decorated gifts under the Christmas tree. It is not the same if you just throw the gifts with no wrapping, and where is the fun in that?
The biggest issue with traditional wrapping paper is that its dyes and lamination make recycling difficult. This means that most of that paper does not end up in a plastic bin for reuse, but in trash bags headed for a landfill, and we produce 4 million pounds of it.
To get an idea of how much that is, the typical density of gift wrap is 60 grams per square meter (or about 0.012 pounds per square foot). At 4 million pounds, that’s over 333 million square feet, or about 5,787 NFL football fields worth of wrapping. One option to reduce your contribution to this is to try and find wrapping paper made with recycled content. A better option is to wrap with paper that is already lying around like newspaper or brown paper.
No worries if this is your first time, follow this tutorial to sustainably wrap your gifts with newspaper this holiday season, and if wrapping is not your style, follow this tutorial to make gift bags out of newspapers as well.
If you want a more neutral look, you can wrap your gifts with brown paper. This approach also gives you the freedom to paint over the paper and create infinitely many designs — allowing you to personalize for each giftee.
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Edited by Sydney Keener