Christmas Gifts: Sustainable and Eco-Friendly Ideas
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9 sustainable Christmas gift ideas for different recipients
The festive season is a time for family, friends and giving. It is also an opportunity to think more carefully about what we buy and how our choices can have a smaller impact on the environment.
As awareness around sustainability grows, gift-giving is evolving too. Choosing thoughtful, useful and more sustainable gifts can be a simple way to show someone you care without creating unnecessary waste.
For the person who has everything
The honest answer is usually not an object at all. Tickets, a class, a booking or a day out land better than another thing for the shelf, and so does an offer of your own time with a date already attached to it. If you do want something to hand over on the day, keep it small and consumable so it gets used up rather than stored.
For someone who never stops
A mineral soak is the prompt, the forty minutes is the gift for the person that never seems to stop. OM’s bath soak gift set includes smaller portions of each soak, making it an easy way to try the range and discover a favourite before choosing a full-size jar. With the bath ritual gift box, you can select a full-size soak and add a selection of botanicals to create a relaxing bathing experience. Both gift options come beautifully presented in a ready-to-give box.
For a workplace Secret Santa
Small and consumable is the right sustainable decision for this case. Know your spending ceiling and browse the full gift range. Avoid anything that needs the recipient to already own particular equipment.
For the tea drinker
Two things land reliably: good tea or something to brew it in. Loose leaf organic tea is the right choice for experienced drinkers where you know they never get enough. Make sure it is eco-friendly by choosing a brand that uses reusable glass jars. Alternatively glass teaware is a great option if they have the tea covered.
For the chocolate lover
A sustainable gift idea for them is a cacao gift set. The Dust range is a collection of organic drinking chocolate rather than a box of chocolates, which means they last longer than one sitting and can be made one cup at a time.
For the children
For your own children, choose something that gets them outdoors, away from the screens, and can be used for years. A bicycle, scooter, skateboard or pair of roller skates can encourage an active lifestyle while also introducing the idea of getting around without a car. Buying second hand can make this an even more sustainable choice.
For someone else’s children, a small gardening gift can be a good alternative to another toy. Herbs such as basil, mint or rosemary, a small plant or a bee house can give them something to look after and learn from. A plant can also last far longer than most children’s gifts and become something they watch grow over time.
For family overseas or interstate
A great option for the overseas family is to send something that tastes like downunder. The Australian native tea gift set travels flat, post well and the blends found in it are genuinely impossible to buy outside of Australia.
For a gift that keeps arriving
A tea subscription spreads the gift across the year and keeps turning up long after the wrapping is gone. Every single product is packaged eco-friendly in a reusable glass jar. It is also the easiest way to turn a gift into a habit rather than a one time event.
For the last minute, or the very particular
A gift card is not a cop-out when the recipient is fussy, far away or unknown to you. A digital gift certificate also solves the 20 December problem without express freight. So that makes it a suitable last second sustainable christmas gift idea option.
Get to know OM's award-winning mineral bath soak range with this gift set. Perfect for treating yourself.
Enjoy Australia's flavours with our Native Tea Gift Set: 4 award-winning blends + stainless steel tea infuser.
Discover OM's range of award-winning organic teas and herbal infusions with a new tea every month.
Select Options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
1.2L Glass Teapot with Infuser. Made of highly durable borosilicate glass. Can be combined with Tea Warmer.
Select Options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product pageChristmas gift ideas for an Australian summer
Australian Christmas is hot, which quietly rules out a lot of the gift guides written in the northern hemisphere. A scented candle and a woollen throw are a harder sell in Perth in December than in Manchester.
What works in Australia: cold drinks, outdoor food and anything that survives a 38 degree afternoon. An iced tea selection built around cold brewing and summer entertaining gets used in the week it arrives, which is the whole point. The organic blends double as a base for delicious iced tea cocktails on a hot day. If you are hosting rather than buying, the same thinking applies to the table.
The organic Iced Tea Gift Set includes our best selling iced tea cocktail infusion blends.
An award-winning vibrant iced tea blend featuring tangy berries and tart hibiscus, with sweet rose overtones.
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Create your own Bath Gift Box including your choice of mineral bath soak, rose petals and a mini sage smudge stick.
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A luxurious handcrafted copper bathing bowl inviting the indulgence and ritual of bathing into the everyday.
Select Options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product pageHomemade and second hand gift ideas
Homemade still works and it works best when it is edible. Fruit jams, chutneys, biscuits and dips cost little, use what is in season and come with an obvious use-by. If you want something more festive and Australian, a batch of homemade rocky road fills a reused jar nicely, and a bottle of mulled wine can also be enjoyed cold.
Second hand deserves more credit than it gets. CSIRO’s festive waste advice lists buying second hand, giving experiences, memberships or vouchers, and gifting plants or baked goods as ways to cut waste, and notes that non-physical gifts are less likely to end up forgotten in a cupboard (1).
Eco-friendly wrapping ideas
Assume most decorative wrapping paper is not recyclable and work backwards from there. Glitter, metallic finishes, fancy dyes and velvet flock all send paper to landfill, and tissue paper fibres are too short to be recycled into new paper. Cellophane and shiny papers are difficult to recycle and do not survive being reused, and plastic tape should be swapped for paper tape, twine or recyclable ribbon (2). OM offers the eco-friendly options at checkout.Â
The advice Sustainability Victoria gave for that guidance is the simplest rule going: use as little packaging as possible and make sure what you do use is both made from recycled content and recyclable or compostable afterwards (2).
What to use instead for truly sustainable gift wrapping:
Fabric. Furoshiki-style cloth wrapping, a tea towel, a scarf or a linen remnant becomes part of the gift.
Plain kraft paper or last week’s newspaper, tied with twine and a sprig of something from the garden.
Reused jars and tins. Presenting a gift in glass, such as homemade jam or bath salts, avoids wrapping altogether (1).Â
Children’s drawings, which are free and land better than anything off a roll.
And pull the sticky tape off before the paper goes in the recycling bin.
What makes a Christmas gift sustainable?
A sustainable Christmas gift is one that gets used up or used often, made by someone whose practices you can actually check. Materials matter, but they matter less than fit. A bamboo gadget that lives in a drawer has a worse footprint than a conventional thing that gets used every day.
The festive numbers make the case. Australia produces 76 million tonnes of waste a year and that figure rises by around 30% over the festive season, with more than 150,000 km of wrapping paper used on Christmas gifts (1). Most of that is decided in the fortnight before Christmas, by people guessing.
So the useful question is not which gift is greenest. It is whether this one will be opened, used and finished. Three things follow, in order: ask, choose a form that suits the person, then check the claims on the label to make sure it is truly sustainable.
Why asking what someone wants is best
Asking someone what they want is the highest-yield move in gift giving, and it is the one most of us skip. Givers believe an unsolicited gift shows more thought. Recipients disagree.
Five experiments by Francesca Gino and Francis Flynn tested this with real wedding presents, imagined birthday scenarios and an Amazon wish list study. Recipients appreciated the items they had requested more than unsolicited ones and rated them as more thoughtful and more considerate. Givers predicted the opposite, assuming that going off-list would impress (3).
One detail is worth stealing. The same research found that givers respond better to a single specific suggestion than to a long wish list (3). So if you are on the receiving end, name one thing. If you are buying, ask for one thing rather than “any ideas?”.
This is not the death of surprise. You can ask what someone wants and still choose the blend, the scent, the colour and the way it arrives.
Should you give an experience or an object?
Giving an experience is also a great option for a sustainable gift. Give one where you can, and where you cannot, give an object that creates one. Experiential gifts do more for a relationship than material ones and the effect holds even when the two of you do not share the experience.
Chan and Mogilner tested this across four experiments with real gift exchanges between friends, partners and family, published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2017. Recipients of experiential gifts reported greater improvement in relationship strength than recipients of material gifts, and the driver was the intensity of emotion felt while using the gift rather than while unwrapping it (4).
The most useful study for gift buyers is the one with the mug. Two hundred people were given an identical wrapped coffee mug to pass on. Half the mugs read “my coffee mug”, half read “my coffee time”. Recipients of the mug that named the experience reported a greater strengthening of the relationship, even though they liked the two mugs equally. A later study in the same paper found that material gifts which evoke intense emotion during use strengthened relationships as much as experiences did. (4)
Practically: the thing you give is half of it, the way you frame it is the other half. A teapot is an object. A teapot given as “the twenty minutes before anyone else wakes up” is closer to an experience. Write the ritual on the card, not the features.
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Gift form | What the evidence supports | Best for | Main risk |
Object | Lasts, but strengthens the relationship less than an experience unless it stirs real feeling in use | Someone who has told you exactly what they need | Becomes clutter if the fit is wrong |
Object that creates a ritual | Framing an object around the experience it gives improved relationship strength in testing | Someone whose days are short on pause | Only works if they already want that ritual |
Experience | Strongest effect on relationship strength, shared or not | People who say they have everything | Needs a date in a diary or it expires |
Consumable | No long-term evidence base, but it cannot accumulate | Almost anyone, and anyone in a small home | Allergies, intolerances and strong taste preferences |
Gift card | Recipients rate cash and requested items highly, above unrequested gifts | Late decisions and distant recipients | Reads as thoughtless unless you pair it with a note or a small item |
How can you tell a real sustainability claim from a slogan?
Look for a named certification or a specific, checkable fact. Broad words like “green”, “eco” and “sustainable” carry no legal definition on their own and Australia’s consumer regulator has found plenty of them that do not stand up.
In an October 2022 internet sweep published in March 2023, the ACCC reviewed 247 businesses and identified 57% as having made concerning claims about their environmental credentials, with the cosmetics sector, the clothing and footwear sector and the food and drink sector among those with the highest proportion of concerning claims. Its position is that businesses using broad claims such as “environmentally friendly” or “sustainable” must back them with evidence such as reliable scientific reports, transparent supply chain information or reputable third party certification (5).
“Organic” is the one that surprises people. In Australia, organic certification is not legally required for a product sold domestically to be described as organic, and the domestic standard AS 6000-2015 is voluntary. Businesses must be able to prove any organic claim they make, and the ACCC’s own advice to shoppers is to look for a certification logo, ask the business which certification it holds, and research it if you do not recognise it (6). The standard owned by the Department of Agriculture is mandatory for organic products intended for export, which is why exporting brands are often certified even when they sell at home.
Four checks that take about a minute each:
Is there a certification mark, and does the brand name the certifying body? Organic Merchant’s is set out on its certification page.
Does the brand say what its packaging is made of, in specifics rather than adjectives? Ours is described on the packaging page.
Is there anything independent behind the quality claims, such as judged industry awards?
Does the brand explain its production approach anywhere you can read it, like a list of sustainability commitments?
Sample six award-winning, sugar-free healthy drinking chocolate powders mixed with superherbs for tasty delights.
Give yourself or a loved one the gift of wellness with 4 organic teas handmade in Sydney + 1 infuser.
An award-winning organic black tea infused with refreshing citrus tones and fragrant French florals.
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A black tea boasting aromatic native lemon myrtle notes with warm woody eucalypt tones, made in Sydney.
Select Options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product pageThat’s a wrap
We hope this article has given you some ideas for more thoughtful and sustainable gifts for friends and family. When it comes to wrapping, recycled paper is a simple way to reduce waste. Sustainable gifting doesn’t mean giving up the enjoyment of the festive season. It is simply about making more considered choices, from the gifts we buy to the way we wrap them.
Frequently Asked Questions
No, and it usually improves the gift. Ask for one specific thing rather than a list, because a single suggestion is easier to act on. If asking directly feels blunt, ask a partner, sibling or housemate instead.
If there is no sentimental value attached from the giver’s side, pass it on to someone who will use it or donate it. Keeping an unwanted item in a cupboard out of guilt is the one option that helps nobody. If you regift, choose a recipient who genuinely suits the item rather than the nearest available person.
Only if you know the details. Consumable gifts can contain nuts, dairy, gluten or added sugar, so read the ingredients before you buy and check anything you make yourself. When in doubt, a gift card removes the risk entirely.
Choose a blend that is made for pregnancy, or ask her what she already drinks. Not every herb is intended for use in pregnancy or breastfeeding, and the safest approach is to let her or her midwife make that call rather than guessing from a label.
Name the experience you are giving and say why you chose it for that person. Two sentences on a card, written in your own words, will usually land better than spending another twenty dollars.
Order by the end of the first week of December for anywhere in Australia. If you have left it later than that, a digital gift certificate arrives instantly and does not travel by plane.
It depends on whether the contents belong together. A hamper that describes one occasion, such as a morning or a bath routine, reads as thoughtful. A hamper assembled from unrelated items reads as filler, and the items get separated and forgotten.
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References
CSIRO, “All I want for Christmas is less plastic waste: tips for the festive season”, 2023.Â
Business Victoria with Sustainability Victoria, “Unwrapping the benefits of eco-friendly packaging”, updated 2025.Â
Gino, F. and Flynn, F.J. (2011) ‘Give them what they want: The benefits of explicitness in gift exchange’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(5), pp. 915–922.Â
Chan, C. and Mogilner, C., “Experiential Gifts Foster Stronger Social Relationships Than Material Gifts”, Journal of Consumer Research, 43(6), 2017.Â
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, “ACCC ‘greenwashing’ internet sweep unearths widespread concerning claims”, 2023.Â
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, “Organic claims”, consumer guidance.