Dear Dot,

Can you help me figure out how to stop all the catalogs I get in the mail? A terrible waste of paper!  

–Virginia, Santa Barbara

Dear Virginia,

It can feel like something of a mystery in our digital age how catalogs have not only refused to die but continue to pile up through our mail slots, often unbidden. After all, a marketing email costs mere pennies to send while full-color catalogs can cost 100 times that. But the Harvard Business Review reported in 2020 that catalogs had been growing in popularity since 2015. Companies continue to send catalogs because they work. We spend more when we purchase from a catalog and we are more likely to make repeat purchases. What’s more, unrequested marketing emails are often filtered-out spam while unrequested catalogs will be delivered to us…

All of which is to say, Virginia, that catalogs seem here to stay — 5.6 million tons of catalogs and other direct mail advertisements that end up in U.S. landfills annually — but that’s not the same as saying there aren’t steps to ensure that we don’t become buried beneath the full-color pages of Restoration Hardware or L.L. Bean…. 

Click here to learn how to opt out of catalogs.

Dear Dot,
My 10-year-old daughter is very eco-conscious and doesn’t want her gifts wrapped in anything that isn’t “compostable, recycled, or reusable.” I love the look of brightly wrapped gifts beneath the tree — preferably in coordinating patterns, thanks to being indoctrinated by Martha Stewart over the years. Ideas?

–Evelyn

Dear Evelyn,

In my early 20s, I spent a Christmas morning with my then-boyfriend’s family watching them tear open their gifts like savages. In the corner grew a pile of the now useless wrapping paper, which was later tossed into the fireplace. I was aghast. I had been trained to carefully open my gifts without so much as a tear in the paper, which Mother Dot would carefully fold up and tuck away until the next year, when it would be used to wrap another gift that would be carefully unwrapped. Consequently, gifts we were opening in the 80s came wrapped in paper that dated back to the advent of the women’s liberation movement, which never has freed women from the emotional labor of gift-purchasing and wrapping. But I digress. 

I laud your daughter’s desire to wrap mindfully. While some wrapping paper is recyclable (if you can tear it or it stays scrunched up when you crumple it, it’s likely recyclable), plenty isn’t, including anything that’s foil, glittery, metallic, or contains rope or ribbons (such as gift bags).

Lucky for your daughter — and you with your Martha Stewart ethos — wrapping options are not only sustainable but stylish…. 

Find five stylish, sustainable, gift-wrapping ideas from Dot here.