17/12/2022
Lets talk about paper today.
If the paper is brown it's recycled, correct? Well, that's not necessarily the case.
Often brown kraft paper is mistaken for recycled, but usually comes from old growth forests. Paper use is one of greatest causes of deforestation. Since settlement in Australia, over 90% of our old growth forests have been cleared or logged and paper production continues to drive the destruction of forests.
Paper that claims to only have recycled content does very little for recycling as the actual content is minimal and often is just faulty paper that is fed back through the paper mill again.
What about the decorative gift wrap, what is that made of?
Wrapping paper is more likely to be made from virgin fibre, because it’s easier to turn into colourful, glossy sheets.
Unfortunately, a lot of the innocent paper that seems recyclable is lined with plastic.
As soon as your gift has any glittery wrapping on it, it's not recyclable. Plus, it's probably sending a bunch of microplastics into your home, parks, and oceans.
The same goes for shiny or dyed paper. Cheaper wrapping paper is often laminated (hence the plastic), contains unrecyclable additives, or their fibres simply aren't strong enough to be reused.
Wrapping paper is so popular at Christmas time that Australians use more than 150,000km of it during the festive season. That's enough to wrap around the Earth four times, and works out to about 8 metres per person.
Kiwis alone go through 10,000 trees-worth of wrapping paper.
It's estimated that 4 million tons of waste in the US over the holidays is made up of wrapping paper and shopping bags - this amounts to around 30 million trees cut down.
Canadians throw away about 540,000 tonnes of gift wrapping and gift bags during the holiday season.
It is estimated that in UK around 50,000 trees are cut down each year to make enough wrapping paper.
That is a lot of trees for few seconds of fun, a very sobering statistics about Christmas wrapping and that's only about few countries!
I don't know if anyone has researched the paper waste in flower industry yet but I am sure it is huge. By looking at some posts in social media I am truly questioning, what is being sold? Paper with a few flowers in it?
What to do?
As a flower seller you could opt for recycled paper. Ecocern and HeapsGood are both Australian companies selling recycled paper produced here in Australia from post consumer waste.
Don't be afraid to reuse paper (newspaper, magazines etc.).
Just use as much paper as really necessary. Bulk your bouquets up with foliage or using wise techniques. When delivering to someone's door, do you need to wrap it?
As far as present wrapping goes you could wrap in newspaper, an old scarf from op shop, reuse boxes and paper or try furoshiki, the Japanese art of fabric wrapping.
If you have any clever ideas on how to wrap sustainably please share!
Gorgeus photo by
