PLASTIC-FREE PRESSIES!

It feels like EVERYTHING’S made of it at this time of year. But if you search hard enough, it IS possible to find . . .

FROM the glint of a decorative bow under the tree, to the joy of watching a loved one tear open glossy gift wrap, nothing symbolises the excitement of Christmas quite like giving a present.

Unfortunately, our delight at finding (and wrapping) the perfect gift often comes at the detriment of the environment, for plastic lurks in even the least likely of festive purchases.

Glossy gift wrap contains plastic in its shiny, laminated coating. So does much of the ribbon we tie to presents and the enticing glitter glued to Christmas cards, one billion of which were sold in the UK last year.

Then there is the plastic in sticky tape: six million rolls are bought in the run-up to the festive season.

Some beauty gift sets, meanwhile, still have microbeads (tiny plastic balls the Mail has campaigned to ban), while glass bottles of bubble bath may have plastic lids or seals.

Most gadgets contain plastic and, since such devices are cynically designed to be quickly upgraded (we throw out more than a million tonnes of electronics each year), chances are your loved ones will soon tire of their gifts.

And, of course, plastic toys are hard to ignore. Most of Amazon’s current top 20 bestselling toys for babies and toddlers contain plastic, while this year’s biggest kids’ craze, the L.O.L. Big Surprise, is a plastic-filled ball featuring 50 gifts and layers of wrapping.

Then there is the packaging in which our presents arrive — 56 per cent of plastic waste generated each year is packaging and some 125,000 tonnes are binned every Christmas.

Even some of the sustainable or non-plastic items featured on these pages may be wrapped in small amounts of the stuff if you buy online — instead, shop at bricks-and-mortar stores and ask them not to wrap things up.

Theoretically, most of this plastic can be recycled, but, as the Mail revealed this week, many local authorities are failing to meet recycling targets, citing budget cuts and contamination among their reasons, meaning less than a third is actually reused.

The rest accumulates in landfill, clogs up our streets as litter — or ends up in the ocean.

Sobering statistics, then — especially given that one recent study found that of the 81 million unwanted gifts we receive annually in Britain, one in ten will end up in landfill.

‘We’re aggressively encouraged to buy gifts that contain more plastic than ever and often end up with environmental disasters on our hands on Christmas Day,’ says Julian Kirby, waste campaigner at Friends Of The earth. ‘But there are ways of fulfilling the desire to give a gift that don’t have as much impact.’

Indeed, there are gifts for all the family that won’t exacerbate our environmental crisis. Here’s our plastic-free present guide . . .