I Will Have Mine Wrapped in Paper & Fruit

Written by Gesare Nelly from Green Thing

Christmas is a joyful time, a time to get together to catch up with family, share and feel love, mostly by sharing gifts. It’s that time when most of the gift wrapping that is used in Kenya is either plastic or a material that will never be recycled or reused. This gift wrapping is used once and never again. This is especially damaging because all the plastic that has been produced is still in the landfill, in our water bodies, being consumed by animals or slowly releasing microplastic into our earth’s resources. This makes Christmas one of the most wasteful months of the year.

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It’s the first Christmas for Green Thing Kenya, a plastic-free online shop providing sustainable essentials and our main priority this Christmas is to have packaging that has little to zero carbon footprint using food waste, cotton rope and paper packaging. The largest chunk of food waste in Kenya ends up in the landfill. This wastage has economic, social, and environmental costs. The solution to food waste is composting or drying them for organic gift packaging as we have done with our grapefruits. This way we give a new life to presumable waste.

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Our approach towards packaging is to imitate nature. There is no waste in nature, there are only different resources in different phases of their life cycle. They can either be upcycled into a new item or decomposed to add nutrients to the soil. All the organic packing that we are experimenting with at Green Thing Kenya can be locally sourced, such as: Dried fruits either in the sun or oven can be great plastic-free Christmas tree décor in addition to beautiful seeds like the baobab, jacaranda and even avocado seeds. Avocados peels and seeds make one of the best natural fabric dyes. It gives a beautiful pink.

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So for this Christmas, try to be conscious and give paper and organic processes a try for your gift wrappings and Christmas decor!