I had always gone out of my way to recycle and conserve electricity. But I didn’t understand the true gravity of environmental decline until I watched A Plastic Ocean on Netflix six years ago. That documentary changed my brain — and the way I go about nearly everything on a daily basis. A big part of that has been a new approach to not only shopping for myself, but for other people.
Guilt about over-indulgent holiday shopping was a budding sentiment back in the late 2010s, with the conscionable desire to waste less and buy less exploding into a whole-ass internet trend in 2024. With underconsumption core, fast fashion is out, hauls are out, and going hard on Black Friday just because stuff is cheap is out, while simply using the items you already have, damn it — then buying higher-quality, less-expendable stuff when you do need something new — is in.
Consumerism really puts a damper on holiday cheer particularly as it applies to waste and ethics. Consider how much non-recyclable packaging will be used, how many old tech devices will be trashed to make room for new ones, or how many underpaid workers put in extra hours to get those Shein prices so sketchily low. Of course, there’s always the question of whether your giftee will even use that gift you bought in a hasty scramble, or if they’ll gift it to the trash can to keep the peace in their junk drawer.
As extreme weather makes the climate crisis harder to ignore, many of us wonder what we can do to help. Outside of voting for candidates who take climate change and pollution seriously, using your dollar to shop and gift sustainably is a tangible way to get involved at the individual level.
This isn’t to dismiss the fact that big corporations and their disastrous polluting habits are the root of the problem. We can’t talk about trying to limit our own personal carbon footprint via sustainable gifts without acknowledging that the concept of carbon footprints was created and fed to us by BP, one of the world’s biggest corporate carbon contributors, to shift the blame to people throwing straws away. But making a point to be more eco-friendly on an individual level is still important. The single-use plastic that we toss after 12 minutes will either sit in a landfill and release methane for hundreds of years or join the 8 million metric tons of plastic dumped in the ocean every year that end up in our drinking water, mess with the ocean’s ability to sequester carbon, and have deadly effects on marine life.
If nothing else, an environmentally-friendly gift could spark your giftee’s interest in the bigger sustainability movement, and that’s not nothing. I’ve gathered a solid list of the best sustainable gift ideas below, including several items that I personally use and tell loved ones about. There are affordable add-ons like dishwasher-safe sandwich bags that simply act as a less-wasteful version of something people already use regularly, or more creative, premium eco-friendly gifts like a matching workout set or the comfiest comforter ever — both of which happen to be made from recycled plastic bottles. There’s a gift for every point (and budget) on the journey to go green.