Come on, get with it – reusable gift wrapping has been around for centuries! Our Evergreen Wraps are inspired by ancient Japanese ‘furoshiki’.
You might want to get a pen and paper for the next bit as there are some good facts that will definitely impress family and friends. Japanese furoshiki date back to the mid-Edo period (which you’ll already know was between 1603 and 1868…) Originally furoshiki had nothing to do with gift wrapping, but instead were they were used by people visiting their local public baths.
Literally translated furoshiki means ‘bath spread’ and people used to wrap up their clothes in the furoshiki whilst they had a quick dip. From here people then started to use the furoshiki for other things too like shopping bags, or for carrying their lunch to work, or as the deigns became more elaborate they were used around the house as decorative pieces, and they were of course used for wrapping gifts.
Some more tasty facts coming up. These ones will impress your slightly hippy ‘free spirited’ friends – we all have a couple of them.
Due to the poor quality of the paper and the finishes and glosses applied to it and all of the sticky tape on it, the majority of wrapping paper cannot be recycled and instead ends up in our landfill sites. At Christmas time in the UK we use 11,000 tons of wrapping paper, which is enough to gift wrap a large Channel Island. It takes 6 mature trees to make one ton of wrapping paper; for those without a calculator that means we destroy 66,000 trees every Christmas – imagine how many we use over the course of a year.
Evergreen Wraps aren’t a just a nice novel way to wrap a present they are part of a solution to reduce the amount of stuff we throw away, to reduce the pressure on our planet’s forests and to limit carbon emissions. Gosh, that sounds a bit serious, sorry. Any way, we hope there are some good facts there for the next time you’re stuck for conversation or feel like showing off.
