Once you’ve chosen thoughtful, eco-friendly gifts for your loved ones, the challenge is to wrap them without contributing to the extra 5 million tons of garbage generated in the US each holiday season (that’s about 25% more garbage than we generate at other times of year!). There are a couple of great ideas for cutting down on waste:

• Wrap gifts in old newspaper or thrift store fabrics and ribbons
• Use brown paper bags (although hopefully you don’t have a tone of these, because you are using your resusable canvas bags)
• Get creative with magazines and even junk mail (hopefully you have stopped your junk mail. If you haven’t, go here to learn how).

For any gifts we give, we save ribbon, boxes and paper all year round from gifts we have received. And we just use all of that to make our gift wrap.

What other gift-wrapping ideas do you have for the holidays (Hanukkah, Christmas) or seasonal birthdays?