It is Christmas Eve day and the oomph behind this week’s task starts this evening. On top of that,
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.
Great idea on collecting the paper. But I do hope you car is eco-friendly or otherwise the hauling is combined with other things you had to drive out for anyways…
But that aside, great you wrapped your own gifts in newspaper. For next year here’s another idea: Decorate the newspaper wrapping with ribbons cut from old wrapping paper that is f.e. to small for rewrapping.
I wrap in any old paper I have around the house and that also includes packing on craft markets (read here if you like: http://trashcollector.blogspot.com/2009/10/my-antique-matrix-printer.html)
All my gifts are handmade with reused yarn and my overseas swap gift this year came in a wrap of tulle that I can reuse in a future project:
http://trashcollector.blogspot.com/2009/12/hgtv-gift-exchange-and-my-easy-chair.html
Yes… we collected the bags when we left the houses. No extra trip needed and thanks for reading.