Скачать или смотреть How to wrap gifts with paper and string | Earth Collective's guide to a Conscious Christmas

In Australia, we use approximately 8,000 tons of wrapping paper every year!

Much of the time, wrapping paper is coated with not-so-planet-loving synthetics like glitter and plastic, used just once before discarded, making it a sneaky single-use item that’s crept into our habits.

Wrapping paper seems to get sexier and sexier every year, with a battle of modern designs taking to the shop windows. Elegant, hipster, chic, au natural – whatever you think your recipient will love, it’s out there.

Unfortunately, so much of today’s wrapping paper isn’t eco-friendly.

We can get caught up in the design and overlook the fact that the pretty motifs and shiny sparkles are actually cheeky coatings, imprintings or pepperings of plastic.

Hopefully, these ‘pretty bits’ are at least on a base of recycled paper but there’s a lot of options available that aren’t: fresh from the tree, wrapped around your gift, then binned.

If all that weren’t bad enough, we’ve normalised the process of fusing our wrapping masterpieces together with plastic-based, atomic-strength sticky tape and adorning them with synthetic bows and ribbons. When we break those products apart, we get a host of plastics and an arsenal of chemicals.

That’s a hell of a lot of manufacturing and synthetics that have become totally normal in today’s gift-giving process for a short-lived surprise.

Are you thinking scrooge? Bear with me…

Wrapping is a part of the gift-giving process; for the giver and the recipient.

The gift giver takes a conscious moment to choose the paper, to sit down and wrap the present, and to think about what they’re sharing. The recipient is greeted with a surprise and a moment of suspense before the reveal.

It’s magic!

We don’t need to take away those conscious human moments that gift wrapping so happily creates us; we just need to do it differently. Like with paper and string!

FOR 7 MORE OF OUR FAVOURITE ECO-FRIENDLY WAYS TO WRAP YOUR GIFTS head to: https://weareearthcollective.com/8-ec...

Music credit: Scott Holmes "Kiss the Sky".