Tomorrow is a special day: our anniversary! One year since I hit send on the first one5c newsletter and you stepped up to start saving the world. It’s been a privilege to spend the past 12 months with you, learning and talking about the impact each of us can have.
Of course, there are a lot more of you now, which never ceases to astonish me. Even more astonishing are those who reach out every day to discuss newsletters, float ideas, and even just offer support. How do you find the time? Get a job! Kidding, of course. I’m so grateful—not just that you read, but that you’re out there and I’m not just typing into the void.
If you’ve been with me since the beginning, you’ll recognize this piece. But it hit me the other day that the vast majority of you have probably never seen it before and it would be genuinely useful to you and I could get away with a light week on the writing front. Double score. So I recycled it: took a spin through, cleaned up an inexcusable typo, updated some numbers, and changed some language that I don’t like any more.
I hope you like it, and that it gives you some ideas. As a side-note, this will be my last email of 2022. If you’d like to give me a holiday gift, please share this email with every person on your holiday card list—preferably before they start wrapping their presents.
It’s overwhelming to dwell on every way in which you’re potentially harming the planet. You start doing the guilt-math; then the paralysis of despair sets in. You shut down and start thinking about something else. We aren’t going to save the world by obsessing over our imperfect behaviors, because focusing on how you’re repeatedly failing at something is a great way to succeed at quitting it. Instead, always be on the lookout for little wins. That stuff adds up.
So let’s talk about wrapping presents—no Grinches allowed. Fact: You are going to buy gifts. Fact: You are going to wrap them. Fact: We can do better than we did last year and feel good about that. How? We’re gonna excommunicate tape.
The problem with plastic tape
I was wrapping something, used the last bit of tape, and idly wondered how much had been on the spool. 650 inches. That’s 54 feet of ¾-inch-wide plastic, enough to encircle a full-size pickup. How much had I used on the gift? 10 inches. It wasn’t even a big box.
Tape seems like such a stupid little thing to worry about—especially when it’s on the outside of something with a much heftier environmental bar tab. But that insignificance makes it all the easier to eliminate. Nobody cares about tape. You’re not ruining any memories by using less of the stuff. When on the hunt for easy ways to take plastic out of circulation, tape is an easy mark.
So how much holiday tape are we talking about? That’s a borderline impossible question, but here’s a swing: Based on reading too many studies, experiencing a lifetime of Christmases, and conducting an all-but-useless Twitter poll, I’m estimating 5.5 gifts (mean) per American this holiday. The math on this is sketchy, but it’s good enough for rhetorical purposes:
5.5 gifts per person * 331,900,000 people in the United States = 1,825,450,000 gifts
Multiply that by 10 inches of tape per present, divide by 12 to get feet, keep going with the math stuff… 5,280… and we’re at 288,107 miles of adhesive plastic. You could stick one end to a rocket, grab the other end, and almost make it around the planet twice while your ship flies to the moon. That’s a lot of tape, even my the assumptions are wildly off.
Maybe it’s more relatable to think about weight: Scotch tape weighs about 0.029 grams per inch. Which means our space-bound strand amounts to 583.5 tons of plastic. All that waste stemming from something that nobody gives a crap about.
Even if everyone just reduced their tape use by 20%—2 inches per package—that would keep 116.7 tons of plastic from ending up in landfills. Which is where it goes. The glue on the back of your tape makes it very difficult to recycle. There is biodegradable cellulose tape, but Scotch dominates.
Do you need tape to wrap presents? Of course not. Brown paper packages tied up with string, right? People wrapped presents long before 3M came along. So I reached out to Brian Moylan, professional gift wrapper (and author and podcast host), to learn how.
Which is how we got the following video:
How to wrap presents without tape
Give it a try! And while you’re in the mindset, here are a few other simple ways to be easier on the environment without crashing your sleigh.
Choose the right wrapping paper
Everybody loves a blinged-out and repeating Rudolph motif, but the more adorned your paper is, the harder it is to recycle. Glitter- and foil-emblazoned wrap tends to get yanked off of recycling plant conveyor belts. Materials recovery facilities (MRFs) don’t want to see a single sparkly red nose, because it messes with their process. Fortunately, Popular Science has a guide to the best recyclable—and even compostable—wrapping papers.
You might also consider reusing an old newspaper or magazine (if you still read printed things). Brown paper bags work well, too.
Gift bags keep on giving
You don’t tear open a gift bag, so why not reuse it? Especially if you’ve got a holiday themed one, nobody’s going to see it again for a year. Unless the recipient wants it, just take the thing back. Maybe put hashmarks on the bottom and see how many times you can trot that thing out.
Japanese wrapping cloths
When I lived in Japan, people used to wrap everything in swaths of textile called furoshiki. Lunch boxes, books, pens, whatever. Presents were another common use. Typically you give the cloth back after you open your gift, but sometimes the furoshiki is part of the package. Apparently, that practice is still popular.
Being Japan, there are all sorts of cool techniques to make your holiday understory look just as festive as if you were littering it with paper-wrapped boxes.
From the community
The last time I sent this, I asked readers if they had ideas for low-waste gift wrap. They did! Here are some good responses:
From Samantha:
Pillowcases! Our friend’s Mom is an early-days environmentalist and she used to wrap the kids’ presents in their pillowcases.
This sounded pretty janky to me (sorry, Sam), so I spent a few minutes on Pinterest, and… yup, still janky. So I decided to try it myself. I ended up doing a standard furoshiki fold, and honestly, not bad! I’ll keep practicing, and will keep an eye out for Rudolph sheets at the thrift store. Look out, Christmas 2022
Another reader, Alex, chimed in on Instagram with my favorite:
I try to wrap small gifts for grandparents in my son’s old artwork.
HELL YES. Our daughter brings home so much bad art from preschool. Now I might actually keep some of the stuff longer than the couple guilty days it spends “displayed” next to the recycling bin.
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I’m sure you all have a million other tricks, and I’d love to hear about them. Feel free to leave them in the comments or email me. Or hit us up on Instagram. (Technically Twitter, too, but that place sucks right now so we’re not spending much time there.)
As always, thanks so much for taking the time to read this. If you have questions or just want to say hi, please reach out. And in case you’re feeling generous: all I want for Christmas is for you to share this email with others who might be interested in saving the world.
Take care of yourselves—and the rest of us, too.
Joe Brown
joe@one5c.com