Sustainable Eco Gifts for Everyone at Gift a Tree

Through buying with Gift a Tree you can rest assured that your gift is 100% sustainable and eco friendly.

We are extremely proud to be carbon negative as everything we do has a positive impact on the planet as we plant trees and supply eco gifts to people worldwide – without any form of shipping.

However, we are aware that people wish to do the right thing and buy other eco gifts that are not trees but can you be sure if they are eco friendly and sustainable?

We have made this guide for you.

Are your choice of gifts eco friendly and sustainable?

When buying so called eco gifts this year, can you be sure if they are sustainable or ethically made?

Whether you are buying for Christmas, Birthday or Anniversary, you need to be sure that your choice is a perfect eco gift. If you are buying a gift for him or her, you need to know if the claim ‘eco gift’ is genuine.

Generally, when a consumer buys from a company in the knowledge that they provide eco-friendly and sustainable goods, the question is, do they really?

We now hear more and more claims like, ‘We provide environmentally friendly goods’ or ‘Our products are 100% sustainable’ or ‘All of our gifts are ethically made’.

How does the consumer really know if this is the case or just a ploy to hopefully attract more business? For example. A company may claim something like, ‘Our stock is natural, organic and wildlife-friendly’ How do you know if that is true?

The bottom line is that unfortunately most items, goods and products are not eco-friendly even if they appear to be.

Find out if your selected gift you select is truly sustainable

Key questions to ask yourself, or better, the store owner when making a decision to purchase true eco friendly and sustainable gifts.

The eco gift you select – Is it made locally?
It could be that a company sells 100% natural honey but if it has been imported from far overseas, it is far from environmentally friendly once all the shipping has been taken into account. Even if the honey is made locally, where was the jar sourced from? It could be that it was made in the Far East and had to be shipped over.

What is the shipping cost to the environment?
If something as small as a jar is shipped from one side of the planet to the other, it could be argued that this has no impact on the environment at all but when you multiply that jar by 10s of millions, which is how many are exported each year, the cost through CO2 emissions alone is astronomical – even more so if they were moved via air freight. Once you apply this simple insight to each product you buy, your eyes will soon be opened. You can see the devastating effect has on the environment though using our CO2 Emissions Calculator

Does the vendor do anything to offset the item so he/she can claim to be carbon neutral?
Of course we are aware that most items to need to have some form of shipping associated with them but do they offset their emissions to claim the item is a sustainable eco gift? If the answer to this is yes and you know it to be true, you can buy the item with real confidence – or can you?

Do you have to travel to get the item?
Take our jar of local honey as an example. If you have to travel to the supermarket to obtain the item how do you get there? If you made just one trip to buy the single jar of local honey in a sustainable jar your carbon emissions through travelling have likely set the neutral scenario straight into a carbon negative. We are not saying that you should never go to the store, simply be aware as to how often you go there and by which means of transport. Better still, walking and/or cycling would be the perfect environmentally friendly way to travel but we appreciate that may not always be possible.

Are products truly sustainable?
If a set of wooden furniture is declared as sustainable, this means that for every piece of wood used within the product, it would have to be replaced. However, in addition to that, the plant where the furniture is made would need to be sustainable and all the employees who work there would have to have sustainable lives. You can quickly envisage how the product would not be sustainable even if it were declared to be so.

Why Gift a Tree is Different?
At Gift a Tree we send out no products via mail so our shipping is nil. When you buy or donate to gift a tree, you can rest assured that 100% of everything we do is sustainable. Our farm has the latest heat pump technology providing warmth, which is run by solar panels on our barn roof.

When you buy a tree for someone, we aim to plant it within 7 days, whether and type permitting and send you a certificate via email giving you the precise location so you can check that it is planted.

In the future we intend to sell physical products that will be made from sustainable materials and for everything we send in the regular mail, we will plant trees to offset our carbon footprint.

Make a difference to the environment today and buy from us with confidence.

Find out more about sustainable eco-friendly gifts

Sustainable gift guide for 2021 from Forbes