Archive for the ‘Week 10 Gift Wrap’ category

Let my greener Christmas begin

December 24th, 2009

It is Christmas Eve day and the oomph behind this week’s task starts this evening.  On top of that,Our Green Gifts we are getting a snow storm right now.  My green task for the week is to recycle or reuse gift wrapping from our family’s houses and our own.  Tonight I will likely collect over 10 garbage bags of wrapping paper.  So, I will be driving around in my little Saturn, 12 inches deep in snow with 10 bags of wrapping paper.  What am I going to do?

I had contacted the City of Fargo and they indicated that gift wrapping cannot be recycled because of contaminants.  The bows, ribbons and foiled paper cause issues with recycling.  I was really counting on this since I know I am going to collect A TON of wrapping from the 40+ people we will be collecting wrapping from.

I think I will have to do some of the crafts I outlined in a previous post.  Actually, I think I am really looking forward to trying to make my own paper out of the stuff that cannot be used elsewhere.  Other than that, we will try to harvest usable wrapping paper out of what is left and go from there.

Tonight we wrapped our gifts and I am very proud of our green wrapping!  We only used newspaper, reused gift bags and reused gift wrapping to package our gifts.  I did use some tags that we already had, but expect to use homemade ones from now on.  If you have any green stories about this Christmas or previous holidays, please tell me about them in the comment area below.

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13 Awesome ways to reuse your Christmas gift wrap

December 22nd, 2009
  1. Reuse what you can as your own wrapping paper.
  2. Shred it and use this paper as packing material
  3. Add wrapping paper to your compost.
  4. Use it for various crafts.
  5. Turn the white side out and use it for mail wrapping
  6. Make your own Christmas ornaments using Christmas paper
  7. Make your own artsy fartsy paper
  8. Ask the local pet shelter or pet store if they can use the shredded paper for animal bedding
  9. Shred it and use this as Easter Basket hay
  10. Make your own items using this paper.
  11. Use for Card Making
  12. Use the decorative paper for scrapbooking if you have any scrap bookers in your family
  13. Recycling…. But check your City to see if they take this as recycling.  I am not sure if my city takes this paper and am currently checking on that.  I HOPE they do because I know I am going to have a TON of paper from recycling all of the paper of our families.

Let us know your ideas in the comment area below.

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How much Christmas gift wrapping can I recycle this week?

December 21st, 2009

It is Christmas week!  Yay!  What a great time of the year and I hope you all have a SPECTACULAR holiday season doing whatever you enjoy doing.  I am sure that many of you will exchange presents on Christmas Eve or Christmas Morning and this week’s task revolves around gift, or gift wrapping to be exact.  The green challenge that Ashley has assigned me this week to is to conserve, recycle and reuse wrapping paper.

This is going to be a very interesting task because part of this is to recycle the gift wrap that would otherwise be thrown away at our family’s houses.  We will likely spend some time at Ashley’s parents and we will also spend some time with some of my family.   My aunt has something like 15 grandchildren who all have gifts to unwrap.  This does not include the 9 kids of hers, their spouses and the various other people who may open a gift over Christmas.  My estimation is that we will be taking the used gift wrapping of about 30 people this Christmas season.

As of this moment, I have absolutely no idea what I am going to do with it and I am not even sure the city of Fargo will take it as recycling.  I have previously written about what I can do with junk mail, and I am sure there will be some similarities.   This week’s task is to collect all gift wrapping and find a way to either recycle or reuse this waste.   Please let me know if you have any unique ideas for me on this one.

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