It’s Christmas Day and a beautifully decorated tree sits in your house with colourful presents at its base. But five minutes after the serious business of unwrapping starts, the shiny paper is in shreds, stuffed in a black bin bag and heading for the local landfill.

Lots of wrapping paper is not only paper, it’s layered with plastic and foil and can’t go in the roadside recycling bins. So, how about taking up the challenge of not adding to this year’s seasonal landfill by making sure that all your gift wrappings this Christmas are recycled or recyclable?

Over the next few weeks keep an eye out for packaging coming into your house that could be reused. Lots of companies who deliver by post are doing their bit and are wrapping their products in strong, recyclable brown paper. If you’ve got access to some tame children you could take the pressure off a cold, wet Sunday in December and sponge print some wrapping paper together. If you don’t have any ready-made sponge shapes, buy a car washing sponge and cut it up into sections. Draw a Christmas tree or snowman outline on the piece of sponge and use sharp scissors to cut round the outline. You might have to trim the edges of the sponge if it’s a really thick one.

Make wrapping paper easier to re-use next year by tying presents with ribbon or string instead of sticky tape. Use plain paper and wrap it up like an old fashioned parcel with red or green twine (chat up the gardener in your house to source this). Twine or string can’t go in the recycling bin but it can be composted and ribbons can be re-used.

And if you want the ultimate in no-waste wrapping try your hand at Furoshiki, the Japanese art of wrapping presents with a piece of re-usable fabric. Recycle Now has a video link to show you how. http://www.recyclenow.com/what_can_i_do_today/furoshiki_japanese_w.html

If you’re not feeling quite that brave but still want a traditional look you can buy sturdy gift bags which can be used again next year. We have some cardboard bags and some felt stockings that are headed for their 5^th Christmas and they seem quite happy sitting up in the loft waiting for their next airing. Be warned though, choose designs you like, as once you get into the habit of re-using you may never have to buy wrapping paper again!

And finally, if you’re in need of Christmas stockings, take a look at www.ravelry.com for free knitting and crochet patterns.

So, why not make it a house or family competition to come up with the most inventive/eye-catching/ humorous wrapping? All of these ideas can be reused or recycled in the Winchester Area.

The Isle of Wight festival was fantastic.  Great bands, exciting food and a lot of day glo leggings and hats on show.

Aside from being just an amazing festival, there was quite a push for recycling this year and throughout the event, short videos were played on the big screens promoting recycling.  One of the most effective and noticeable things they did was to put a 20p refundable deposit on every drink sold in the main arena.

You can't bring your own drinks into the main arena so you get all your drinks from the bars around the edges that all use the same plastic or paper cups.  A 20p deposit was taken for every cup and next to the bars there were recycling points where you take them back and get your refund.

This seemed to work well if you were heading back to the bar for another drink but if not it could be a long walk and really crowded to get to the refund points.  20p obviously wasn't enough of an incentive for everyone as lots of cups were left on the ground or thrown into bins.

However, the Isle of Wight is a very family friendly festival and it didn't take long forchildren to realise they could make a lot of pocket money collecting cups and after a while there were children staggering around with towers of cups piled high as they went around picking them up, asking people for empty ones or even raiding the bins.

The recycling points then counted them up and the kids were making a packet.  The picture below shows one family who managed to build an arch out of collected cups.  There were probably around 300 there so £60 worth!

In the end this recycling idea probably worked really well but maybe not quite in the way the organisers expected.  I just saw today in the news that at the Latitude festival there was a £2 refundable deposit on glasses  which is much more likely to encourage people to return them.