Help me buy sustainably for the holidays

NINA MOINI: Now it's time for our Minnesota Now series, Professional Help. I love this one. We all need a little help to get through life sometimes. From everyday questions to more complex problems, we're asking the experts to lend us a hand. Here's Minnesota Now producer Alanna Elder.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ALANNA ELDER: Maybe you've had this experience. You're standing in the store aisle doing some last-minute gift shopping, and you are just getting further and further from making a decision. You're questioning everything. And everything-- the sweaters on the rack, the kitchen gadgets on the shelf-- all start to look the same until a part of you wants to scream--

JANIS IAN: You're plastic-- cold, shiny, hard plastic!

ALANNA ELDER: Not to be a buzzkill, but a lot of the gifts we buy this holiday season will probably end up in a landfill eventually, polluting the Earth long after we're gone. And making that stuff releases greenhouse gas emissions that are fueling climate change. At the same time, many small business owners rely on holiday spending, and it's a major part of the economy. I could go on, but instead, I called for Professional Help.

EMILY BARKER: A lot of times, we think about gifting as this kind of obligatory action, something we have to do because it's a holiday.

ALANNA ELDER: Emily Barker is executive director of Reuse Minnesota. It's an organization that works to protect the environment by promoting reuse, repair, and borrowing, rather than buying new. For the last three years, they've put out a holiday gift guide.

EMILY BARKER: The one thing that's just really awesome about Reused-- or one of the things that's awesome about Reuse-- is that you can find something that's unique and special for someone that it's very unlikely anyone else is going to find for that particular holiday. There's a lot of us who just have so much stuff in our homes already. We are overwhelmed by the amount of stuff in our lives. And so finding something that's maybe not a thing is also really valuable. So a membership or an activity.

ALANNA ELDER: I think with finding something used, it seems like it can show that you've also put a lot of time into finding the right thing. So do you have any recommendations for finding a good gift at a thrift store, besides just digging a lot?

EMILY BARKER: So this is maybe not super helpful now, given the timing, but for future, my recommendation is to always keep your eyes open. If you have a person that you know, like, I would like to get a gift for, starting in September, if you go to the thrift store and to not make it a high-pressure thing, watch for things that might be of interest to someone in your life.

The other option is to just-- there are so many thrift stores that are willing to give you a hand. If you come in and you say, hey, I'm looking for somebody who really has everything, but they could really use a fun piece of art. Do you have anything like that or some recommendations?

ALANNA ELDER: Handmade gifts can be really meaningful, too. I know I've had the experience of attempting a craft project, and I end up spending more than I meant to. And then maybe it doesn't come together. At this point, it's not cute to give people a picture frame made of popsicle sticks or something. So do you have any suggestions for gifts that people can make that are actually nice?

EMILY BARKER: Yeah. So I first want to put a plug-in for a couple of organizations that offer creative Reuse supplies. So starting with things that have been reused or surplus materials, so Art Scraps in St. Paul and then Loose Parts Laboratory in St. Louis Park are two organizations that sell materials that you might find at a typical craft or supply store like that.

And the nice thing is you can buy a single item that you need to put on whatever you're making, instead of a bag of 50. I am someone who loves repurposing textiles. So one of the fun things that you could think about is, even if you don't feel like you've got the creative juices to make an actual gift, to think about making the gift wrapping and having that be part of the gift.

So for example, last year, we had a class on how people could take old button-up shirts that were damaged-- maybe they were worn-out on the collars or they had stains. And they could turn it inside out and sew around the edges, and then cut off the sleeves. And the torso of the shirt becomes the gift wrap. So you use the buttons.

ALANNA ELDER: Cute.

EMILY BARKER: And that gift, that wrapping, becomes both a way to avoid the waste of wrapping paper, which, unfortunately, has to go in the trash. But also, it gives that gift that person can gift to somebody else in the future.

ALANNA ELDER: Yeah. Yeah, I love that idea. You mentioned earlier options that aren't physical gifts. Can you talk again about what some good ideas there would be?

EMILY BARKER: One of my things that I absolutely love are our Library of Things options. So what I mean by that is where you purchase a membership, and then you can check things out as you need them. So it's like a public library, but it's for other things. So we have the Minnesota Toy Library, the Minnesota Tool Library, the Twin Cities Library of Things, the Southwest Lending Library, and the Kaleidoscope Learning, which is in St. Paul, and they also are a toy library.

So if you've got somebody with young kids, a new homeowner who needs tools, or maybe you've got somebody in your life who loves to entertain, but they don't really have the space to have all of the dishes and stuff, the Library of Things offers the three-tier cupcake stands and stuff like that.

Or the Southwest Lending Library, they have a bouncy house. They have sewing machines. That's something that I'm super excited about because it still allows people to give the gift of stuff, and most of them are in the range-- I don't have it in front of me-- but between $50 and $150.

The other thing that, in our gift guide, we mention is, we've got a lot of nonprofit organizations that really could use a lot of support. Unfortunately, nonprofit donations generally are down. And giving a gift of a financial donation to a nonprofit organization is a really great way to help their mission and do a gift in honor of something. And I know that that's not a new idea at all, but I think it's something that more people would be glad to be the recipient of.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ALANNA ELDER: We'll have a link to Reuse Minnesota's gift guide for this year on our website, mprnews.org. For MPR News, I'm Alanna Elder.

NINA MOINI: Thanks, Alanna. You can hear that series, again, called Professional Help. It's every other Thursday, right here on Minnesota Now. Or again, if you missed one, find the whole collection at mprnews.org.