Holidays and Gifts

As we moved closer to the holidays I thought this would be a good week to start implementing some new holiday waste reduction methods. Every family has traditions and some may produce more than others. Gifts might also be the biggest addition to waste with all of the packaging before and after it's received by the person.

family context:

My mom loves the holidays so any change in tradition would surely confuse her. We send holiday cards, make gingerbread house, and buy poppers for the kids. Mom orders a lot of gifts online and finds the best deals for boxes and wrapping paper. Most of our wrapping paper gets burned in our fireplace and the boxed get reused if they aren't destroyed, but still we could always do better.

My plan:

Bea had lots of helpful ideas such as:

Simplify traditions
Send electronic Christmas cards
Recycle old holiday cards
Give gifts that are experiences not items (quality not quantity)
Let others know you’re trying to reduce waste
Give second hand gifts
Use a gift to wrap another gift
Use newspaper and twine instead of wrapping paper and tape.
Reuse old gift bags

I knew right away my mom wouldn't like some of these ideas, but I still tired them out.

What actually happened:

Choosing Gifts:

As expected there was a lot of ordering online, but we recycled as much as we could. We did give a lot of experiences as gifts though, so that helped the gift wrapping process.

Holiday Cards:

My mom refused to send electronic cards. We did recycle old ones after the season was over and made ours on recyclable paper.

Gift Wrapping:

Over the past few months I knew this was going to happen so I started saving bags that were given to me and my family which made it easy not to buy new bags. We tried to not waste any wrapping paper by saving and using the scarps for smaller presents. My mom also did not use boxes for my gifts, but did for others because she thought they looked "sad".

Traditions:

Poppers were still unavoidable since I have younger cousins but the paper was recycled or burned. Our gingerbread houses were killers. In the log you'll notice the numbers in parentheses. Those are from the gingerbread houses only. We bought four kits and they had candy wrapped in insane amounts of packaging. It would have been so much better if we made everything ourselves and bought the candy in normal sized bags. However this would have taken a lot more time and would probably have costed more money in long run.

My Santa presents (most without extra packaging)

Example of an experience gift; one free cupcake a month at a local bakery

My sister's Santa presents (all were inside a suitcase that was part of her present)

data analysis:

While the gingerbread house kits had a lot of packaging they were relatively small which helped us keep the two garbage bags a week pattern going. A lot of orders came in this week too which added to the boxes. Cards also came in that didn't make it to the display area which added to the mail.

Google Sites

Report abuse