Is wrapping paper recyclable?
It depends
Plain paper wrap, yes. Foil, glitter or plastic-coated wrap, no. Scrunch it in your fist. If it stays balled up it is paper and can be recycled; if it springs back it cannot.
Follow it down the line
Three different questions hide inside "is this recyclable?", and the answer can change at each step.
The material · Sometimes
Is the material recyclable?
The trap is the name. Plenty of 'wrapping paper' is not paper alone: it is paper bonded to a metalized film, coated in plastic, or dusted with glitter. Plain paper wrap is ordinary recyclable paper. The decorated kind is a composite of two materials that cannot be pulled apart again, which puts it in a different category entirely despite looking and feeling similar on the roll. There is a hand test for this, and the paper industry endorses it rather than merely tolerating it. Scrunch a sheet into a ball. If it stays balled up it is paper based and can go in with the paper; if it springs back open it is carrying enough film or foil to behave like plastic, and it should be reused instead. The American Forest and Paper Association puts the line in those exact terms and extends it to the rest of the pile: ribbons and bows are not accepted in curbside bins, and decorative tissue paper counts as recyclable so long as it is neither glittery nor metallic. Hold on to that last one, because your own program may well disagree with it, and the reason it disagrees is the interesting part.
Sources: AF&PA: How to recycle paper during the holiday season, KQED: Can You Recycle Your Wrapping Paper?
The facility · Sometimes
Will a sorting facility recover it?
Paper wrap runs with the paper stream without trouble. Metalized and laminated wrap cannot be separated back into its layers during repulping, so it is contamination rather than feedstock. It helps to know what those two words actually name. A laminate is several layers of foil, paper and plastic bonded together. A metalized film is a polymer film carrying a microscopically thin coat of metal, usually aluminum, which buys the glossy look of foil at a fraction of the weight and cost. Neither is built to come apart again, and that is the problem at the mill, because pulping is a wash rather than a sort. Recovered paper goes into a large pulper, is mixed with water and agitated until the individual fibers release, and the things that are not fiber, the staples and plastic liners and coatings and tapes and adhesives, are separated out and sent for disposal rather than recovered. Mills surveyed by their own trade association name laminated and metalized foils among the elements that make that job harder. Glitter is the worst of the decorations and the least obviously so. It is a microplastic, typically under five millimeters across and often etched aluminum bonded to plastic film, which is far too small for sorting machinery to pick out. So it is not removed. It disperses through the pulp, degrades the quality of what comes out, and can be enough on its own to send an otherwise good batch to landfill or incineration.
Sources: AF&PA: Design Guidance for Recyclability, DS Smith: The Unseen Challenge, Why Glitter is a Recycling Obstacle
Your curbside program · Varies
Will your curbside program take it?
Most programs that take mixed paper will take plain wrapping paper, and none want the foil or glitter kind. The practical problem is that both arrive in the same bin in the same week. The December surge is the one time of year when a lot of households put a lot of unsortable material into recycling at once. The wording is strikingly consistent across programs that agree on very little else. Austin accepts plain wrapping paper in the blue cart and excludes anything with glitter or foil, along with ribbon and bows. San Jose accepts plain wrap, says a bit of tape is fine, and rules out shiny and metallic paper, bows and ribbons. Cuyahoga County lists plain wrapping paper and plain gift bags as accepted, then disposes of the decorations in a single line: no foil, ribbon, glitter, rope, fabric or other decorations, because decor on cards, gift bags and wrapping paper contaminates the process. Cuyahoga is also where the tissue paper question resolves, and the answer turns out to be about route rather than material. It keeps tissue wrapping and crepe paper out of the curbside cart on the grounds that the paper is too light to be sorted properly at a mixed recycling facility, and then says undecorated tissue wrapping can be recycled at a designated mixed paper drop-off. So the national trade body and the local program are not really contradicting each other. One is describing the fiber and the other is describing the machine the fiber has to survive.
Sources: CuyahogaRecycles: paper and boxes, San Jose Recycles: Wrapping Paper, City of Austin: 'Tis the season for extra recycling
What you need to do
- Do the scrunch test: stays balled up means paper, springs back means composite
- Remove ribbon, bows and gift tags; these are not paper and do not belong in the bin
- Pull off the heaviest tape; small amounts are tolerated, thick bands are not
- Flatten it rather than balling it up for collection
- Check your own program on tissue paper specifically, because national guidance and local rules genuinely differ on it
Where else it can go
Reuse it
Wrap opened carefully folds flat and works again next year. For the decorated kind this is the only route that recovers any value at all, and it is what the paper industry's own holiday guidance tells people to do with foil, plastic and glitter wrap rather than binning it.
Mixed paper drop-off
Some programs that refuse a paper at the curb will take it at a staffed or dedicated drop-off, because the material was never the problem. Cuyahoga County does exactly this with undecorated tissue wrapping, which its curbside sorting line cannot hold on to.
Only worth the trip for undecorated paper. Foil and glitter wrap is refused at both.
Compost plain paper wrap
Uncoated paper wrap composts readily and is a useful carbon-rich addition, which makes it a reasonable destination for sheets too creased or torn to fold flat and reuse.
Plain paper only, not foil, glitter or plastic-coated.
Switch the material
Paper gift bags survive many uses, and plain kraft paper is recyclable without any of the ambiguity, which removes the sorting problem a year ahead rather than arguing about it in January.
Common mistakes
- Assuming anything sold as 'wrapping paper' is paper, when much of it is a paper-plastic composite
- Recycling glittered wrap because the glitter looks incidental; it is plastic and it disperses through the pulp
- Leaving ribbon on, which tangles in sorting equipment the same way plastic bags do
- Taking a national 'yes' as permission when the local program says no. Tissue paper is the clearest case: perfectly good fiber that a mixed recycling line cannot hold on to, so it is accepted at a drop-off and refused at the curb
- Emptying the whole pile into the cart in the last week of December, decorations included, on the assumption that someone downstream will pick it apart