04.12.2020

Here's our eco-friendly guide to buying gift wrap this year.

Make these small changes now to help reduce your Christmas carbon footprint later.
 

1.     Use recycled brown paper, available from your local Post Office or craft shop, as it can be recycled. Use stamper sets to jazz it up and create your own unique Christmas designs.

2.     Instead of buying metallic bows and ribbon, make bows from newspaper, just search tutorials on YouTube to help you perfect the look. 

3.     Use foliage, holly and leaves to decorate presents, check that the items you're using can be placed in with your garden waste recycling in our one off collection in January, once the present has been unwrapped. 

4.     Present your gifts in gift bags instead. Store them away with the Christmas tree and reuse year after year.

5.     Don't forget your Christmas cards and tags - send plain cards without ribbons, embellishments or glitter as these items can't be recycled or if possible, make sure the recipient can remove them before they pop them in their green bags for collection. Alternatively, send an e-card for your Christmas wishes.

If you're planning to get a head start on your present wrapping, please note that we've made changes to how you can dispose of wrapping paper.

Wrapping paper often has a very high ink content, contains non-paper additives like glitter, plastics, gold and silver coloured shapes which cannot be recycled. Others are very thin and contain few good quality fibres for recycling. This product is often rejected during the recycling process. In the past we separated it from other material at our recycling facility, but this is no longer possible due to social distancing requirements.

As part of our commitment to improve the quality of material available to be recycled, we will no longer be accepting wrapping paper - unless it is plain brown wrapping paper – in green recycling bags.

We do, however, understand that residents have large amounts of wrapping paper over the Christmas period, so we’re offering an alternative.

If you can fit your used wrapping paper in your black bin or red stripe bag, that's great, you don't need to do anything else. Just leave it out for collection.

However, if you have any excess wrapping paper after filling up your bin or red striped bag, then for weeks commencing 28^th December and 4^th January only, please put this excess wrapping into a black bin bag and place next to your black bin or red-striped bags and our crews will pick it up.

Please do not put anything other than wrapping paper and other wrapping products e.g, bows, string etc into these bags though, as the crews may not pick them up if they contain other household or general waste.

·       You can still recycle plain brown wrapping paper in your green recycling bags, but please remove any sellotape, bows and tags etc to dispose of with your general waste.

·       The bags with wrapping waste which won’t fit into your black bins or red-striped bags will only be picked up on your general waste collection week – same day as your black bin or red-striped bag collection.

·       Green recycling bags containing any wrapping paper which isn’t plain brown wrapping will not be collected. As stated above you can put plain brown wrapping paper into green recycling bags with other recyclables.

If you’re booking a visit to our recycling centres over the Christmas period, please take your used wrapping paper with you. Book your visit here: https://www.cardiff.gov.uk/ENG/resident/Rubbish-and-recycling/recycling-centres/Pages/default.aspx