Unplastic your Christmas | 6 Sustainable Packaging Ideas

There’s no denying that the festive season of Christmas is privy to a fair bit of excess packaging. From your strawberries purchased in their plastic punnets to your Mum trying to wrap up a new Vacuum Cleaner (Anyone else get ‘Family Gifts’?!) It’s been a life-long mission of mine to keep an eye out for new and innovative ways to wrap up gifts that don’t require the purchase of unnecessary wrapping paper for that 1 minute of joy. Finding a happy medium between the visual beauty, excitement, fun & joy of gifting and receiving presents between loved ones while trying to minimize the level of excess packaging involved in the process is fuzzy.

After years of research & endless trial & error, we have some great ideas that we have whipped into one easy blog post for you. Here are 6 great ideas you can try to implement this Christmas for your Packaging-Free Gifting:

1. Old Glass Jars.Ultimate for home-baked gifts (Like these Delicious Christmas Spiced Nuts) or small toys for the little ones. Make it fancy by adding a piece of fabric over the top of the lid!

2. Wrapped your gift in a cute tote bag! Make the wrapping part of the gift... Want to keep it a little surprise? You can always turn the tote bag inside out so they don’t see the whole story.

3. Wax Wraps, perfect for small gifts (Like jewelry!)you can either make your own Wax Wraps (Recipe over here) or purchase some to use as your Christmas Gift Wrapping paper meaning your lucky human gets 2 gifts in one that are great for the planet!

4. Repurposing Old fabriceither from around the home or your local Op Shop – Old Napkins, Blankets or cut up old clothes make for the perfect alternative to wrapping paper! Ideally wrapped in the Japanese *** Tie situation. The idea is to re-use something that’s already in use and not purchase for the sake of gifting and we think this ticks that box pretty well. The great news is that you can continue to re-use this wrapping for years and years to come.

5. Paper Pockets, ideal for Small Gifts. We love this one that we recently discovered in our favorite GOOD MAGAZINE. Get old office paper, an old paper bag and get sewing! Stitch them into a fun shape like star’s, moon’s, circles or Squares (first time sewer) Time to get crafty!

6. Re-use old gifted paper.Does it have Happy Birthday written on it? Turn it the other way around and draw cute graphics on the outside. How about your kids old drawings from Pre-School? They’ve done the hard work of colouring them in, now they make for perfect wrapping paper!

We’d love to hear any other ideas that you have on how to wrap Christmas Gifts in a Sustainable fashion and avoid buying new paper to then throw away again. Get crafty, get creative and have fun this Christmas shopping consciously and wrapping paper & plastic free for the greater good of our planet.