Nothing excites me more during the holidays than finding the perfect gift for a friend or family member and wrapping it up so that the package looks thoughtful and inviting; however, nothing makes me feel more guilty than all the wasted paper, tissue and ribbons that I have to throw away during the holidays. Americans use more than 8,000 tons of wrapping paper each holiday season, which equals approximately 50,000 trees. Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day the average American household trash output increases this amount by another 5 million extra tons. So this year I set out to find ways to make festive gifts with a lot less guilt and waste.
1) DIY Gift Wrap:
Homemade gift-wrap is a great way to recycle and is a lot more fun for children. You can use recycled brown craft paper or the inside of brown paper grocery bags and paint them, add glitter and/or use stamps. This creates a festive one of kind recycled wrap — great for grandparents. This is a very affordable way to create green gift-wrap. Here is a great source of bulk 70% recycled craft paper:
According to the Carnegie Mellon Green Practices initiative, “If every American family wrapped just three presents in reused materials, it would save enough paper to cover 45,000 football fields.” Old books and magazines are the perfect material to reuse for gift wrap. You can take old magazines and use the images, like pictures of waves from old surfing magazines, for your ocean-loving friends and family. Additionally, images of cars from old car magazines are great for boys of all ages. Most newsstands and bookstores throw out old magazines after the new issues hit the stand — so, if you talk to your local store you may be able to get some great back issues for free.
2) Reusable Gifts Wraps & Bags:
Cloth reusable wraps or bags are another way to create a beautiful package without creating paper waste. There are many small companies making festive bags and wraps in a huge variety of colors. This is great for family gifts. You can start a tradition in your home where you reuse these bags every holiday season; however, it can become a very expensive option if you were to use cloth for all of your gift giving.
For those of you that are very ambitious and great with a needle or thread, you can sew your own gift bags. Reusing cloth makes gift bags/wraps much more affordable. I am not qualified to give sewing advice or instruction, but the following link has easy to follow how to guide to sewing your own reusable bags.
3) Eco Wrapping Paper:
If you are short on time and not very crafty, the easiest way to have more green gift wrap is buying eco gift wrap that made from recycled paper and/ or sustainable natural fibers. There are many great options, such as the paper from Fish Lips Paper Designs.
There are even seeded papers seeded with wild flower seeds that you can plant after you open your gifts available here.
There are so many ways to give our gifts this holiday season in a more thoughtful and green way. After all, the way we give can have as much impact as what we are giving.
I wish you all a very special (and green) holiday season.
MyCityWay’s check-in and location-sharing iPhone app Clingle has added location-based gifts in its latest update, so you can now surprise your family members or friends with gift cards that are revealed to them when they get to the store.
When Clingle was first launched in October this year, it was a free iPhone app that allowed you to check in from locations and leave ‘clings’ there, which were snippets of text, photos or audio that Clingle users in the vicinity later could then see. It was a way for Clingle users to leave each other tips about what to order at a restaurant or which store had the best collection of shoes in a shopping mall.
The other social aspect of the app was to enable you to keep track of where your friends were and what they were up to. You could create groups of friends when you were going on a trip somewhere and use Clingle’s check-ins and tagging features to create a travelogue. You could even leave clings for your friends at certain locations as surprises for them to ‘unlock’.
Although the service was originally targeted at people in India, Singapore and in New York City, an update last month saw it expand its coverage to the whole of USA and the UK, besides adding video clings to its mix of features. It has since expanded to include Melbourne and Sydney in Australia, and MyCityWay plans to cover the entire globe soon.
Building on its existing surprise clings feature and a comprehensive database of locations, Clingle has now added the ability to send location-based gift cards. The next time you are in a Starbucks or an American Eagle store, or even seated in the comfort of your home, you can buy and leave a gift card for your Clingle or Facebook friends at that location, allowing them to unlock it when they get there.
Since Clingle is all about interactive check-ins, you can pair that gift card with a text, image, audio or video cling, to make the whole thing more interactive. Clingle will also alert you when one of your contacts visits a git-enabled store, if you so choose, and you can then instantly send them a gift card through Clingle.
The app uses the soon-to-be-launched iStash to provide integration with over 40 retail stores and you can send gift cards for any of them to your Clingle friends by paying for them by entering your credit card info in the app (which may actually be against Apple policy, but the app is currently available on the App Store, so perhaps we are wrong).
Clingle itself will also be offering free gift cards to its users as rewards for various achievements. For instance, if you join Clingle and leave 25 clings for your friends, you’ll unlock a $5 Starbucks gift card.
Gifting dos not just work with your Clingle friends either—the app allows you to send gifts to your Facebook friends too, but they’d have to join Clingle to be able to redeem them, which is a bummer. We also hope to see Clingle quickly add more stores to its catalogue, and perhaps gifting options other than just gift cards.
However, the system is pretty well-designed overall and adds a touch of fun to the gifting process. If you’re planning to give gift cards to anyone this holiday season, it might be worth giving Clingle a shot.
➤Clingle
When fabric objects are inclined as gifts, in divers cultures they are traditionally packaged in some manner. Into archetype, in Western civilization, gifts are again wrapped in wrapping gazette and accompanied away a gift note which may note the make for, the legatee Prezent name, and the giver’s name. In Chinese refinement, red wrapping connotes luck.