I just sent home a box, catching up on birthdays so far this year. I think I get a B for aesthetics, C for environmental sustainability. Can you help me move to the head of the class?

Aesthetically, I had a color scheme—gold/cardboard, black and pink—but it somehow never came together to have any oomph, so I get marked down there.. One thing I probably should have done differently is the way the lining paper is folded. Those flowers go to the horizon, getting smaller as they approach it. The way it’s folded, the flowers are big and then boom! It’s sky time. I probably either should’ve folded the sky back or folded it so the big flowers were unseen. Instead, i went with the standard tuck in the middle. Ten points off. Also, the layout isn’t great, because only the brown, not the design, of the biggest bag, and you can’t see the whole quote on the medium-sized one.

Environmentally speaking, I minimized the wrapping, but only did a soso job on avoiding new materials. The box itself and the packing peanuts are reused, but the liner paper is new. I had wanted to use newspaper, but waited too long to select the pages, because I hadn’t realized how much color there would be on most newspaper pages. That spoiled the effect. The tissue paper was provided free at a home building supply store, to wrap breakable purchases. I used some for my flowerpots & then brought extra because I like it. This is the “extra”. It’s never been used before—economical for me, but doesn’t cut down on resource use.

Two “gift” bags are the ones stores gave me for my purchase; the other was bought at World Market a couple years ago and is on its 2nd or 3rd use. The black fabric tote bag with the Berlin stencil was 2€, so I only spent a little and I scored points for sustainability, badaboom. But the final gift is probably the most environmentally packed; it’s a T-shirt rolled up so you can’t see what it is, tied with a ribbon that’s been used before. The only gift bag that contains packaging material is the white one; it has sort of foam paper that I saved from a package, being used around around the steel hooks.

But those tags. They are one-time use items, and came with packaging of their own. Big point loss there. But what else works? At Christmas I can reuse cards. Maybe I should’ve made these myself, given how simple they are.

How about you? How sustainable is your gift wrap? Can you suggest ways for me to do better?