Alternatives to gift wrap
We throw away five million extra tons of trash between Thanksgiving and New Year's, according to the green living Web guide SustainLane.com. Wrapping paper is part of the problem. Here are a few earth-friendly and low-cost alternatives.
- Wrap with reuseble cloth, bags, paper, boxes, or old maps. (At my house I have extra world maps from Doctors Without Borders.)
- Wrap gifts in white butcher paper, then let your kids draw on it in holiday colors.
- Wrap gifts with brown paper bags, newspaper, or the comics. (There's nothing ground-breaking about this tip, but follow the next few ideas to shift the focus to the gift decor.)
- Skip scotch tape, and hold the bundle together with string or twine, which you can reuse.
- Focus on the gift-top décor, which you can make with bells, whistles, fake holly or mistletoe, Pez dispensers, dreidels, small, ceramic figurines, gelt, or fragrant plant trimmings, like rosemary
- Use old VHS and cassette tape as ribbon.
- Tie your brown paper packages with old holiday lights for a funky, found-art look.
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About The Bargain Hunter
Daily News staff writer Julia Scott loves to find bargains on everything from groceries to Gucci. Her tips will help keep your hard earned cash where it belongs - in your pocket.
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My daughter and I are currently in the process of making holiday angels - with existing or recycled materials. We have 3 wooden angel figures purchased on holiday clearance last year and we are using craft paints we already have and recycled ribbons and other pieces from holidays past to decorate them and create their wings, etc.
We have a huge plastic bin with recycled paper, tissue paper, bags & bows that we go to first whenever we need to wrap a gift! The other night I looked through it to get an idea of what I have in there to make sure I don't buy unless I NEED to :)
We also use the recycled bags to carry lunches or other small items we need to take along during our day.
Cindy,
Great idea about using recyclables for decoration! Let me know how the angels turn out.
~Julia
It's funny this was posted today!...my 3 year old son and I were just outside painting paper grocery bags (with washable paint) for gift wrapping. They turned out so cute and with some tissue paper...voila! holiday gift bag and youngster's work of art.
Aha! I'm telepathic and I didn't even know it. :) ~Julia