The big gift-giving season is still many months away, but with birthdays popping up all year long and the mad rush when the holidays do descend, it’s never a bad time of year to plan your green gifting strategy. Between mountains of wrapping paper and unwanted gifts galore, gift-giving is a notoriously wasteful tradition, but it doesn’t have to be.
Long a faux pas of the highest order, re-gifting is gaining respect in our green-minded and cash-strapped society because it keeps wool sweaters and paper weights out of landfills and recycles them to someone who may actually enjoy them (if indeed there are such people.) The basic rules still apply: don’t re-gift if you think the original giver will find out, don’t re-gift personalized items or items in less than good condition. For more tips, visit Regiftable.com. The site reports that on average 40 million gifts are re-gifted each year. That’s 40 million items not taking up space in a landfill right now⎯now that would be a faux pas.
Planet Green offers some other tips to make the re-gifting process as smooth as possible, the most novel of which is to do your re-gifting out in the open and throw a gift-swap party where everyone can bring their unwanted junk and trade for something they may actually use.
Another alternative is to donate unwanted gifts to charity. It may not be what the giver intended, but the unwanted gift will do a lot more for someone in need than it will in the back of your closet.
Even worse than gifts going in the garbage is the four million tons of trash produced by wrapping paper and shopping bags each year. At least when your Aunt Mildred gave you that ceramic teddy bear, she had more in mind than destroying and discarding it in 10 seconds.
American households create an extra five million tons of trash between Thanksgiving and New Year’s compared to the rest of the year, and it’s not all discarded fruitcake. A good chunk of it is wrapping paper covered with tape and made with glitter, dyes and metallic foil that can’t be recycled.
To keep paper waste to a minimum, recycle what you can from the gifts you receive, saving bags, boxes and paper for future use. Some recycling programs will take wrapping paper, so if your excited 5-year-old shreds it beyond reuse, try getting rid of it that way. The same old tips for paperless wrapping are all still as good as ever: use a jar, a cloth bag, a scarf⎯anything the recipient can get more than one use out of. Finally, if you gotta have gift wrap, buy a roll of recycled paper from a green retailer.
While a shiny new gift in a shiny new wrapper is hard to resist, it won’t do much good looking lovely in a landfill. So this year plan ahead, give smarter, and make sure it’s the green thought that really counts.
Source: BecauseAction.com
