Top tips for reducing waste and making greener packaging choices this festive season
Christmas is a time for giving… and it won’t just be Santa dishing out gifts to all the good girls and boys on 25th December.
Around the world, family members, friends and loved ones will exchange presents, gifts and cards to open on the big day, as a sign of their love and affection.
As the song goes, it’s the most wonderful time of the year for many people, but Christmas does have its drawbacks and the amount of packaging waste created is up there among the biggest.
We won’t go back over exactly how much packaging is wasted, as there are plenty of articles out there covering that – including our own list of UK Christmas packaging waste facts from last year.
Instead, we’ll focus on the positives and suggest a few ways that anyone can make their Christmas a little bit greener, with our six of the best tips for reducing your packaging waste this Christmas.
1. Try a Secret Santa
Perhaps the simplest way to reduce our packaging waste at Christmas would be to stop giving gifts altogether, but where’s the fun in that?
However, one idea that many families or groups of friends or colleagues do is set up a Secret Santa – sometimes known as a Christkindl – where everyone involved draws one other person’s name out of a hat – or an electronic equivalent – and buys a present just for that person.
Fewer presents overall means less packaging, less wrapping paper and less waste.
But not only does it save on packaging waste, but it also saves everyone a few valuable quid.
2. Reuse old gift bags and wrapping
One of the biggest offenders on the list of packaging waste at Christmas is wrapping paper.
According to WRAP (Waste Resources Action Programme), in 2013 we threw away around 239,000 miles of wrapping paper. That’s enough to reach the moon, or to wrap around the equator 10 times!
Whilst it’s not the most exciting thing to be doing on Christmas Day, if you’re able to salvage any wrapping paper after presents have been open, then save it for next year, as it can be reused.
That’s obviously more easily said than done when excitable kids rip open presents, but if the paper is in a fit condition to save, then save it!
One thing that lend themselves perfectly to reuse is gift bags. Many online retailers – and thinking of one big one in particular – offer a gift wrapping service that uses strong and attractive gift bags that can be used a number of times and still look great.
Of course, any wrapping paper that can be recycled should be recycled, rather than binned. Don’t buy gift wrap that contains foil or glitter. It might look pretty, but it can’t be recycled, so should be avoided at all costs if you want to reduce packaging waste.
3. Try wrapping gifts using a furoshiki
Furoshiki are traditional Japanese cloths that are used to wrap and/or transport goods.
They provide not only a beautiful and eye-catching way to wrap presents (see picture at top of article), but they are also a sustainable alternative to using wrapping paper.
Wrapping Christmas gifts in furoshiki has become more popular outside of Japan in recent years, including here in the UK, as we become a more eco-conscious society.
However, there is a big warning with choosing furoshiki as an eco-friendly wrapping option.
As cotton, silk, nylon or other materials used to make furoshiki take greater energy and resources to produce than a piece of wrapping paper, furoshiki only become an eco-friendly alternative if they are used repeatedly.
Exactly how many times is not clear but, to give you an idea, a cotton tote shopping bag has to be used no fewer than 131 times to have a lower environmental impact than a simple plastic carrier bag used just once, or a paper bag used four times.
What’s more, furoshiki are not cheap to buy, so you might need to choose carefully about who you are gifting them to!
If you can keep them in the family and use them over and over again – or gift them to someone you know will reuse it themselves – then furoshiki could prove a beautiful and sustainable alternative to wrapping paper.
4. Regift unwanted items
Of course, it’s not just the paper that presents are wrapped in that contributes to packaging waste. The packaging for the gifts themselves is usually thrown out straight away.
Worse still is when the present itself is thrown away. Yes, that happens! According to a poll by Finder last year, as many as 6% of unwanted gifts are simply thrown away – that’s one in 16 presents!
Now we’re sure our fine readers are not amongst the culprits, but just in case anyone thinks of doing so this year: please don’t throw out any presents!
If you receive a gift you don’t like, why not just re-gift it to someone else you know would like it? Not only will it brighten up their day, but it means the gift – and the packaging containing it – doesn’t go to waste.
If the gift is so bad that you can’t think of anyone you know who will like it, then give it to your local charity shop. There’s an owner out there who will love and cherish that gift – it just needs to find them.
5. Go wrap-free!
We earlier suggested that perhaps the simplest way to reduce packaging waste would be to stop giving Christmas presents altogether.
But of course there’s a simpler (and less Grinch-y) way – keep giving presents but don’t wrap them in anything!
Let your presents run free, on display to the world in all their glory. After all, the wrapping paper only ever comes off in the end anyway, which is perhaps what Santa is thinking when he stops off in Ireland every year.
As recently as 2016, a poll by Irish news website The Journal found that a majority of Irish households (54%) receive their presents from Santa without any wrapping paper on at all.
Whilst this revelation is difficult for some people to comprehend, if it’s good enough to most of the kids in Ireland, who all still have a magical Christmas, then it must be worth a try.
So why not follow Santa’s Irish traditions and give your presents the Full Monty treatment this year, thereby helping to cut down packaging waste while you’re at it?
6. Go compostable
Not all packaging needs to end up in the recycling bin – or worse still, in landfill – after use (or ideally reuse).
There is an ever-growing range of products made from compostable polymers that will biodegradable into natural elements – e.g. water, carbon dioxide and minerals – when disposed of with your food waste.
At present, these materials are not widely used for wrapping Christmas presents, but there are a range of uses that lend themselves to the Christmas period and could therefore reduce festive waste if more widely used.
Top UK manufacturer Polybags offers a market-leading range of mailing bags, including these strong compostable co-extruded mailing bags that are great for sending Christmas presents in the post. Their eco-mailer range also includes a selection of compostable mailing bags in a variety of colours, including white, green, black, clear and translucent milky-white.
Polybags also offer a great range of compostable vest carrier bags that can be used to both carry home your Christmas dinner ingredients from the supermarket, and then collect up any scraps for disposing of with the food waste after use – but please keep these a minimum as we should also be cutting down on food waste this Christmas!
Everyone at Packaging Knowledge would like to wish all of our readers a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
