Waste Not, Want Not at Christmas

The average Canadian tosses out 50 kg of garbage during the holiday season. That's 25% more than normal. Which means... we toss out about 12 kg of pure Christmas waste. Which, for those of us who are not quite metricized with weights yet... about 25 lbs of Christmas waste. That's an awful lot of wrapping paper...

When I was a kid, my Mom had us save everything! She grew up during the war and learned "waste not, want not" from her parents. At Christmas, we'd take a paring knife and carefully slice under the tape wrapping each gift. No wild tearing of wrapping paper. We would then carefully take off the bow and the name tag (which was taped to one of the bow's tails). We would then fold the wrapping paper carefully and set it aside. Paper went into one brown paper bag. Bows went into another. Ribbons went into another. Name tags into another. All saved for next year. We had the most organized Christmas unwrapping you've ever seen! And we hardly ever had to buy reams and reams of wrapping paper. We would just sort through the old paper from previous years and find a size that worked for the current wrapping project. Eventually, of course, the paper would die but by that point, it gone through at least five, possibly ten Christmases.

Nowadays... things are different... there's only my partner and I and we tend to have different Christmas wrapping systems. My partner is more in the gift bag with tissue paper camp. Whereas I tend to be more in the wrapping paper camp. We do still try to unwrap carefully but... it's not always possible. Although... the gift bags are reused from year to year. And we do try to reuse the tissue paper as well. On top of that, we generally only buy gift bags and rolls of gift wrap from the thrift store and never new. Same with bows and ribbons. It seems like a waste to buy new wrapping paper that will only have a few days of glory before it is torn to shreds and tossed in the trash.

Which got me thinking... what exactly is recyclable when it comes to Christmas waste? The list is shorter than you might think.

Bows

We all have these in our house. We have a whole shoe box full of them. But we never really use them. They don't mail all that well... And for our own presents we tend not to use the bows. They just leave a ripped paper spot where the tape was used to hold them down. And be-bowed presents don't stack all that well.

And they are most definitely not recyclable. Once these bows die (too bedraggled to be reused), they have only one final destination... the garbage.

Instead of a ribbon... maybe put a sprig of cedar or fir on the gift... or a flattish Christmas ornament... All sorts of different ways to spruce up a gift that don't need plastic...

Ribbons

We have another box full of spools of various ribbons. Different colours, sizes, textures. All of them are made from some form of plastic. None of them are recyclable. And if they end up in the recycling stream, they can stop the whole production line when they get tangled around the machinery. Every gotten a string tangled in your vacuum cleaner roller brush? Or around your weed whacker? You know what I mean. Ya gotta stop and spend five or ten minutes trying to untangle that rats's nest. Now scale that up to a recycling facility. Not fun.

Back when I was a kid, we tended to use fabric ribbons, satin or velvet or tule that could be untied and reused over and over again. But fabric ribbons tend to be a bit limp... not like those vibrant plastic curls you get when you pull a ribbon over the edge of a scissor... Those are so much more exciting and sparkly! Not.

We don't really use ribbons anymore except for some mailed presents... but even there... I'm thinking it might be better to ditch the ribbons completely and swap it out for rafia or twine or something equally rustic. Heck, maybe even some satin ribbon from the thrift store! The thing I've noticed is... if we have it in the house, we'll use it. So maybe the trick is to  get rid of it... donate it to the thrift store and swap it out for something more eco-friendly. If you're looking to buy plastic ribbon... don't but it new... go check out the thrift store. Odds are they'll have reams of the stuff.

Wrapping Paper

Not all wrapping paper is paper. Nope, some of it is plasticized and that stuff is most definitely NOT recycable. Here's the no-go list:

• no glitter - none. Not on the paper. Not on the ribbons. Not on the gift cards. As anyone who has used glitter knows... that s*%t gets everywhere!
• no velvet - I thought velvetized paper went out of fashion in the 70s but... apparently not.
• no foil - if you can see vague reflections of yourself in your shiny wrapping paper, odds are it has foil in it or on it. Not recyclable. It's not aluminum foil. It's plastic foil. If you crumple it and it doesn't stay crumpled... it's plastic.
• no holographic material - plastic...
  

Sooo... what's the solution? Plain old gift paper - made out of 100% paper CAN be recycled.

Best place to buy gift wrap... your local thrift store. They usually have rolls and rolls of the stuff and odds are you can find something that fits your theme.

For a few years, my partner and I just bought white wrapping paper and used different colours of ribbons and bows on it. That looked really sharp but... that means using ribbons. Although it would work with fabric ribbons too.

I'm thinking that brown paper tied with string and maybe stencilled with some cool ink stamps would look really nice too. And then a sprig of evergreen with a Christmas ornament or something.

As for us... we are using up our stash of wrapping paper (no glitter, foil, velvet, etc) but I think we are going to be making a pact not to buy anymore wrapping paper. Or ribbons. Or bows.

I know I said up there that actual paper wrapping paper (!) can be recycled but... there are caveats. Winnipeg, for example, says no to wrapping paper because the ink is too intense and it's too hard to get it out. So check with your local municipality...

Oh... and tissue paper can be reycled as well, as long as it is straight-up tissue paper with no extras. No glitter. No sparklies.

If wrapping gifts is your thing, fly at 'er! Just keep the above in mind...

Gift Bags

Most gift bags are plasticized. Even if they look like they're paper... unless you can tear it easily... it likely has a plastic coating either on the inside or outside. Which means most gift bags are NOT recyclable.

A better option is pure paper bags. I was looking online and am starting to see brown paper bags with handles and Christmas decorations. The question then becomes... what are the bag decorations made of? Any glitter... not recyclable. Any velvet? Or anything 3-dimensional? Not recyclable.

I'm also seeing some gift bags that might look like fabric (they aren't like the regular stand up bags but more flowy) but are really foil or some variation of plastic. Not recyclable...

But... gift bags made from real fabric, with real cord (not plastic ribbons) are a definite alternative. If I was a sewer... er... a seamstress... I'd be making gift bags out of fabric from the thrift store. Fabric bags can last forever and are washable and reusable. Just not recyclable...

Gift Cards

We haven't bought new holiday gift cards for years. I just trot down to the thrift store around Christmas time and stock up on different cards. They're usually $0.25 each and I know that my money is going to a good cause.

As for whether or not they are recyclable... some are and some aren't. If you read the no-go list for gift wrap above... it's the same with gift cards. Musical gift card? Not recyclable. Glitter or foil or velvet or three dimensional doo-dads and weird textures? Not recyclable. Although... you likely can tear off the paper half that is recyclable.

Christmas Trees

Real or fake? That is the enduring question. Basically... either one is not great on the environment. The best option would be to have a real tree in a pot that you then plant in your backyard. If you already have a fake tree, then keep it and make it last for at least 20 years. If you get a new fake tree every few years, you'd be more eco-friendly if you just got a real tree every year. Or... go down to the thrift store, odds are they have a number of fake trees on display... and you can save one from being landfilled. If you are going to get a real tree... make sure you don't drive a long distance to get the tree and/or buy it from a local Christmas tree farm (not one of those Home Depot trees that come via rail from across the country!).

Our fake tree is about 15 years old and still going strong. It's a tall, skinny tree with faux fir, spruce and pine twigs - a very unnatural combination! But it works and we like it. So we'll keep it. If it ever dies... we'll likely go with either a thrift store tree or a local Christmas tree farm one. Or maybe cut our own under the power lines... Oh, and just to be clear, fake Christmas trees are not recyclable, too many different plastics and metals all tangled together...

If you do get a real tree, for goodness sake, dispose of it responsibly. Most municipalities have some form of real Christmas tree recycling options. Bring it to a central collection point and they will be chipped to form mulch.

But here's the thing... tinsel is NOT mulchable. If your tree looks like this (pic at right)... with tinsel tossed willy nilly everywhere... you might want to reconsider your use of tinsel. Because odds are, you won't be able to get every single piece of tinsel off of the tree before you take it to be mulched...

Growing up, we always had tinsel (or lametta) on the tree but it was hung in small bunches on the branch tips, the final touch to decorating the tree. At the end of the Christmas season, we carefully gathered up every bunch of tinsel and placed it in organized bundles in paper towel, to be reused the following year. And the year after that... and the decade after that. I still have our childhood bunches of tinsel (decades later). The stuff lasts forever! Except... we never use it because cats and tinsel do NOT mix... So, the tinsel is going into the thrift store donation box where hopefully someone else will use it... in a sustainable and eco-friendly way.

I'm not even going to touch on Christmas tree decorations. So many of them nowadays are plastic. We have quite a stash of vintage Christmas balls that are made from thin glass... love them.

We don't buy new Christmas tree decorations every year, but just keep reusing what we have. We don't have themed Christmases or any particular colour that we go for. In fact... you don't need a lot to make a cute tree...

We spent one winter on Salt Spring Island at a vacation rental (our five month foray to see if my partner could survive a rainy West Coast winter). We got our tree from under the power lines (a first for my partner), put it in a pail with rocks and decorated it with strings of popcorn and rose hip berries. We scrounged some bits of holly, baby's breath and shreds of arbutus bark. And tucked a few small stuffed animals into the branches.

It was the cutest tree ever and we still remember it, and the whole adventure that went with it, very fondly.

We don't have to buy into the Christmas marketing fiasco... we can choose to go simple and rustic. It's usually cheaper and better for the environment.