Today is my birthday! Being plastic free can be a minefield when it comes to birthdays. It's always incredibly kind of people to give a gift, but the packaging associated with gifts can mean you end up generating waste completely unintentionally. However, this year my friends and family have been super in helping me to keep my waste to a minimum - I know some have done so purposefully but whether or not that's the case the gifts have been lovely and I'm really happy at the lack of waste. The main waste is sellotape, this isn't recyclable but when I was looking into paper tapes at Christmas I found them to be incredibly expensive. I'm also a sellotape user so please don't think I'm complaining here, just stating facts. I will continue to use the roll that I have until it's used up (which as it's had hardly any used will be quite some time). I've read many stories this month about how people are throwing out anything in their houses that is plastic so they can go plastic free and that really isn't the point of Plastic Free July. As I mentioned in an earlier post, it's about not generating single use plastic waste. If you have a plastic tub, use it, and use it again and again and again until it's no further use. Throwing out perfectly good plastic items is as bad as generating single use plastic waste.
But back to birthdays. I also received a present in a gift box with bubble wrap. This is totally fine with me as I will use the box for someone else and given how many times I move house, I wouldn't be without bubble wrap! Various people have been really generous and given me money and my sister and her family have adopted me an Orangutan. She got me a Hawksbill Turtle for Christmas and I absolutely love this type of gift. There was a WWF stand at Hampton Court Palace last week and when the guy went to ask me about adopting an animal I think he thought I was a bit of a nutter when I got really excited and told him that I already had a turtle and had a new animal on the way for my birthday the next week which I didn't know what it was but was really excited about it! For me, I'm delighted to receive charity gifts; I give to range of charities every month so this totally aligns with my values. I don't ever give to children's, animal or cancer research charities but the charities I support monthly are: Sightsavers, Wateraid, RNLI and Macmillan (I support the cancer support charities, just not the research ones - they get enough money), my Amazon Smile charity is the Stroke Association and Sparks card is the British Legion. One that caught my eye recently is the Toilet Twinning charity where you 'twin' your toilet with one in a developing country which enables them to build new toilets in the places where people don't currently have them. Think this may go on my Christmas list!
One of my friends gave me some fabulous giraffe material, which was a genius present. She gave it me in a paper bag which will go in my recycling and I'll have much fun making things with the material.
Generally at Christmas over the last few years my gifts have been wrapped in brown paper. There will be ribbons and bows that won't be recyclable but if people were so inclined, they could recycle the wrapping paper. To make it fully recyclable, a rustic jute string can be used to tie it up and luggage tags make great gift tags - I usually get a either a stamp and add a decoration or use a shaped cutter of something like holly leaves to give them a festive feel. I think this year I'm going to make material bags. They won't necessarily be in a festive print but I have lots of odds and ends of material that this would be a good way of using it up, plus material bags are always handy to have around.
Chances are, if you've received a gift from me in a gift bag, it will be one that I've received previously. Even if the tag's been written on, it can just be removed and the bag is perfectly good enough. In a way, to reduce waste you do have to be a bit of a hoarder, but I find the 'Really Useful Boxes' are great at helping to keep things tidy. Yes, they're plastic but as I've said before, reusable plastic is fine; it's the single use stuff that causes virtually all the problems we have with it.
I'm going to busy celebrating over the next few days and so won't be posting until next week. By then I'll be half way through the month and so we'll see how well I've been doing and I'll tell you how plastic free (or not) my celebrations were!!
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