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Wrap a Few in Newspaper Featured on Dec 13, 2010

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Challenge Details

Our low-CO2 holidays march on. Maybe you’ll burn downsized candles in your Hanukkah menorah. Or you’ve put up LED Christmas lights on a live Christmas tree that you can replant. What else can you do to reduce your holiday carbon impact? Well, how about learning to wrap responsibly?

The Carbon Connection
Americans are paper gluttons. According to the Worldwatch Institute, the United States has only 5 percent of the world’s population but consumes 30 percent of the world’s paper. Paper and cardboard make up over 40% of the solid waste buried in North American landfills.

And as much waste as Americans produce the rest of the year, it only gets worse during the holidays. Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, Americans throw away more than a million tons of additional garbage. Care to think about how many of those hundreds of thousands of tons of garbage are holiday wrapping paper?

The manufacture of wrapping paper requires energy. That energy most likely comes from the burning of fossil fuels, which releases carbon dioxide into Earth’s atmosphere. And the raw material for paper is wood. Millions of trees are cut down just to make the holiday wrapping paper that looks good on your presents but that quickly gets ripped off and thrown away.

Getting It Done
Need help meeting this Challenge? Here are a few simple suggestions:

• Lots of people have started wrapping their holiday presents in newspapers. The Sunday color comics make particularly festive wrapping paper. You can then make the wrapped present more attractive by tying on a nice ribbon, drawing on it with markers or crayons or perhaps adding sparkles or glitter glue. Be sure to check how permanent your newspaper’s ink is before giving this a try. The ink used in some newspapers (those of you who have ever gone to work with a dark smudge on your nose know this all too well) comes off on your hands. You wouldn’t want that on your carpet or on your guest’s hands. If you can’t use newspaper, you might also want to consider craft paper, old maps, magazines, paper bags, or even wallpaper.
• There are lots more ways to “wrap” those holiday presents. Think out of the box about your boxes! You can use cereal boxes or other existing containers you already have in the house. If you have a big gift, turn it into a treasure hunt. Don’t wrap the present; hide it and give the person a series of clues to find it.
• It turns out that “brown paper packages tied up with strings” is not only a catchy song lyric, but also sound advice for recycling holiday wrap. Of course, you should try to recycle any wrapping paper you aren’t going to reuse next year. But beware, your community’s recycling program may not accept traditional wrapping paper. Recycled paper mills often want to avoid the headaches of dealing with the metallic dyes used in many holiday wrapping papers. But if you wrap your gifts in brown paper bags you already have on hand and tie them up with string (or ribbon) instead of tape, you’re all set.

What are your favorite ways of reducing holiday paper use? Please share them in the Challenge forum section below.

Rules of the Challenge
We know you probably have more than 6 presents to wrap between now and Christmas. But this Challenge asks you to wrap just 6 of your holiday presents in found materials, such as old newspapers. By avoiding the production and consumption of the new wrapping paper you would have used wrapping those 6 gifts, you will reduce your CO2 emissions by 2 lbs. This is a one-time challenge, and it can’t be repeated.

Learn More
The Daily Green – 4 Creative Ways to Wrap a Gift
Paper Mojo Alternative Wrapping Papers
The Greening of Christmas
Top 10 Green Gift Wrap Ideas

See the Math
The math is pretty easy time around. Here are our basic assumptions:

• Our research shows a CO2 savings of 0.3 lbs per average-sized present you wrap in alternative materials. This number reflects the energy that would have been used to manufacture the new wrapping paper you are not using, as well as the energy used to transport that wrapping paper from the factory to your local store.
• We know it might be unrealistic to avoid new wrapping paper altogether, so we propose that Rallyers wrap just 6 presents in re-used or alternative paper. At 0.3 lbs CO2 per present, we are “rounding up” a little and assigning a total savings of 2 lbs CO2 for this Challenge.

Two pounds might not seem like much. But this is a fun and easy Challenge! And it’s simple enough that everyone can do it. If every Rallyer takes this Challenge, the CO2 savings will add up. And that’s a gift you can share with everyone, isn’t it?

Happy holidays!

Discussion 70 comments so far

PotterPerson almost 3 years ago

It was a perfect way to show how green I was at my bf birthday party. cool!