How are you doing with all of our green holiday tips so far? We’ve covered “Zero Waste Holidays” tips on holiday cards, holiday lights, pre-cycling and Christmas trees. North Americans produce 25% more waste during the winter holidays – that’s 25 million extra tons of garbage going to the landfill. The Whole Foods Market Green Mission Team has gathered our favorite tips to feature on this blog throughout the holidays to help us all reduce our load. Our customers are some of the greenest folks around, so please share your tips with us too. Hopefully we’ll help each other discover new and creative ways to live lighter on the planet this holiday season.

Gift Wrap
If you’ve ever seen a typical living room on Christmas morning, you already know that gift wrap is a HUGE issue for greening our holidays. We’ve heard that if every family in America reused just two feet of holiday ribbon, we’d have 38,000 miles – enough to tie a bow around the planet. Wouldn’t that be a nice gift?

• Reuseable gift bags are perfect for eliminating waste.
• Better yet, use A Better Bag – it’s sturdy and can be reused over and over and over again. We have smaller ones for 79 cents and the large ones are 99 cents. A great deal for reusable gift wrap that doubles as a present!
• Decorate an unwrapped gift with reused ribbons and bows or dried grasses and flowers.
• Use a pretty dish towel, an old scarf, fabric scraps or a bed sheet to wrap gifts of all sizes.
• Use old calendar photos to wrap smaller gifts.
• If you do buy wrapping paper, make sure it’s made from post-consumer recycled paper and is non-metallic. Less ink and non-shiny surfaces make it easier to recycle.
• Use string, ribbon or wool for wrapping gifts rather than sticky tape. The string and paper can then be reused.
• Shipping a fragile gift? Instead of Styrofoam packing peanuts, use unbuttered popcorn. Got peanuts with your present this year? Drop off clean Styrofoam peanuts and bubble wrap for reuse at mailing companies.

Now, it’s your turn. What green gift wrap tricks do you have up your sleeve?