Making Sustainable Choices
Many of us are working hard to make changes to be more environmentally conscious these days. This is especially important over the holidays as this is generally a time of greater consumption. There are plenty of improvements everyone can make to ensure less waste is being produced this holiday season. Even small changes to your holiday routines can make a big impact. These changes don’t have to be difficult to implement or affect your holiday traditions. Let’s create less stress by planning ahead with some easy changes and together learn how to be sustainable during the holidays.
Sustainable Gifting Options
One of the greatest sources of waste during the holidays is due to gifting. Rolls of wrapping paper only end up in the garbage or recycling centres, and are only functioning to make gifts look nice and add a layer of surprise. Certainly there are better ways we can gift during the holidays that doesn’t require so much paper! Luckily, there are plenty of options that make gifting more sustainable.
Wrap Gifts With Reusable Materials
Instead of stocking up on new rolls of wrapping paper, utilize materials you already own. This can include newspaper, packing paper, fabric pieces, scarves, reusable shopping bags, and more. Get creative and have fun finding new ways to wrap!
Gift experiences over things
It can be easy to over-gift during the holidays, which can result in lots of product waste. One way to avoid gifting things that may end up in a landfill later is to gift experiences. This often will include a gift card or printed material that you can give, without the waste of excessive wrapping. It’s also a very thoughtful gift to give someone a dinner to a restaurant they love or the opportunity to experience an event, trip, or excursion they’ve been wanting to do.
Gift Sharing
Gift sharing is great for many reasons. Having a few parties contribute to a gift means you can pool your money to gift something more substantial, and it means less physical items are needing to be wrapped and/or shipped. Gifting isn’t about the quantity, but the quality. So this is a great way to give something memorable that is also environmentally conscious.
WineCollective Sustainability
We’ve been hard at work at WineCollective to make our wine sharing as sustainable as we can. We ship our wines across the country, but have implemented many changes in our packaging, processes, and shipping practices. These changes have allowed us to make a huge impact on the waste we produce. We’re proud to say that gifting with WineCollective is a great way to give something special, while also being conscious about environmental impacts. Some of the ways we’ve done this includes:
- Switching styrofoam inserts for compostable pulp trays
- Choosing lowest impact shipping by using a variety of carriers
- Shipping in recyclable boxes
- Offering local pickup in the Calgary area to reduce shipping
Environmentally Friendly Gifting is Easy
We can all make changes to our gifting this holiday season in order to decrease our environmental impact. Even the smallest change can snowball into larger movements. It is our goal at WineCollective to continue making improvements to our processes to ensure we’re doing all that we can to be sustainable, which in turn helps you! If you are wondering how to be sustainable during the holidays, we welcome you to check out the gifting options we have available. Happy holidays!