The Clever Way To Reuse Happy Mail Packaging To Save Money This Holiday Season

The holidays are almost here and with them often comes stacks of packages — a cascade  of every size, shape, and weight. It's no secret that mail carriers are some of the busiest workers during the holiday season, and they are anticipating having to deliver over 80 million packages each day to recipients throughout the United States this year. Each box is brimming over with joy, warmth, and unfortunately, a lot of trash, from plastic air pillows to the cardboard box. Luckily, many of these happy mail boxes include paper filler packaging as companies look to find new paths towards sustainability. This year, consider how you can actually reuse packaging as a DIY gift box filler, plus save money, too, with the help of a shredder. 

When you reuse packaging paper as a gift box filler, you extend the paper's lifespan as you give it a new use. You also can save on the cost of buying expensive gift filler materials that you'll only use once and discard, many of which might not be recyclable if made of certain materials. Plastic, metallics, and wax coatings often present in gift wrapping can't be recycled,  which means they end up sitting in the landfill. As you wind your way through Thanksgiving and to the gift-giving holidays, don't ball up your packaging paper for the trash, do this eco-friendly move instead.

Once you've recognized that you have plenty of paper for various DIY gift boxes and bags, just use a paper shredder to turn it into a filler. Clean out any paper stuck from the last time you used your shredder so everything goes through smoothly, then plug in the machine. The shred style will vary by what shredder you use, but the most common are cross-cut and strip-cut. Cross-cut means the paper shreds in a crossing manner both in width and length. Choose any settings, if applicable, and feed the papers in slowly, making sure you empty the catching canister when it gets full. 

If you don't have a shredder, you can still shred the packaging paper into recycled filler with a pair of scissors. Take a sheet of paper, then fold it over several times in neat little lines, unfold, then cut all of these into strips. Depending on the size of your paper, you may want to cut it again so the strips aren't too long. You can also scrunch it for the "crinkly" effect that's popular with some retailers' packaging. Run out of paper? Continue making gift filler by repurposing paper bags from around the house.