Gifting (Green Gifts)

Recently, the term green gifting has entered into mainstream sustainable parlance, though, arguably, the practices encompassed by the phrase have existed for millennia. Today, green gifting straddles a paradox within sustainability movements: it has risen to prominence both as a cutting-edge capitalist marketing tool and as the foundation for radical barter-based anarchism.

What unites most references and instances of green gifting is an abiding interest in replacing excessively wasteful conventions of buying presents with more ecologically sustainable alternatives. Green gifting has emerged as a response to the avid consumerism and commercialism that has come to be negatively associated with gift-oriented holidays, as well as birthdays, weddings, and baby showers. In particular, the Christmas season has become saturated with consumption and its expanding expenses and refuse. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. household trash increases by 25 percent between Thanksgiving (and the notoriously consumptive Black Friday) and New Year's Day. Accordingly, the proposed simplicity of green gifting has captured the imagination and interest of increasing numbers of would-be shoppers and garbage tossers.

The central premise of green gifting is the shift in what constitutes an acceptable and desirable present. Previous de rigueur elements of fine gifts are suddenly distasteful within the new green aesthetic: the shiny wrapping paper and big bow become as uncomely as a Hummer. Green givers oppose excessive packaging, both of the item being given and within the process of giving it. Eschewing new rolls of wrapping paper, green givers encase presents in newspapers, calendars, magazines, or reusable canvas gift bags.

Packaging is also avoided through buying secondhand from thrift and consignment stores or yard and garage sales. Regifting has gained new, green legitimacy—rewrapping and recirculating an unwanted present precludes the ecological impact both of buying something new and of throwing something away. Once a private decision, now online, postholiday barter sites flourish, with unsatisfied recipients swapping newly acquired, undesired merchandise.

Even greener gifts include handmade items. Canned foods and homemade breads constitute the edible and agrarian examples of exemplary—even ancient—green gifting. Meanwhile, quilted, knitted, sewn, crocheted, or hooked handmade textiles have enjoyed a revival as especially green alternatives to store-bought or “brought-on” products, whose production, processing, packaging, distribution, branding, and advertisement bear deleterious ecological and social consequences.

Green gifting has also come to entail gifts pertaining directly to the outdoor world of ecological services: givers can offer the gift of a few trees, lily bulbs, a window box herb garden, heirloom seeds, rain barrels, or even the associated labor itself (of planting trees or applying compost). Often, green gifts comprise services rather than objects, such as baby showers wherein guests offer postnatal household or babysitting help.

Things local and seasonal constitute green intentions in current parlance, but sustainably minded givers embrace the global as well through Fair Trade products, whose finer quality and higher prices often lend themselves particularly to gifts.

This costliness characterizes the more elite end of the green gift spectrum, in which green retailing is a lucrative marketing strategy. Here, green givers do not buy less, they just buy more organic, low-impact, biodegradable objects: high-end ecobeauty products, [Page 182]high-tech solar chargers, and low-flow, chlorine-removing showerheads. Though still grounded in new purchases, such green gifts do improve on conventional counterparts. The long-term worth of recyclable batteries as stocking stuffers outweighs their plastic packaging, as 40 percent of all batteries (which leach toxic metals into the ground at landfills) are bought during the Christmas season. Green jewelry gifts maintain the “bling” while shifting from ecologically and socially suspect mining practices and conflict diamonds to recycled metals and gems. Meanwhile, the World Wide Web abounds with ecological services gift certificates, wherein donors “adopt” an endangered species or save an acre of rainforest in the recipient's name.

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