For more eco-friendly holiday wrapping, some turn to the Japanese art of furoshiki

https://www.npr.org/2023/12/22/ [login to see] /for-more-eco-friendly-holiday-wrapping-some-turn-to-the-japanese-art-of-furoshik
Wrapping paper – that thing that makes our holiday gifts look so festive – has a landfill problem. If it's shiny, metallic, or glitter-encrusted it's not recyclable. And even recycled paper isn't guaranteed to actually get recycled. But there's an alternative, eco-friendlier option that some are turning to this holiday season: the Japanese art of wrapping packages in cloth, known as furoshiki.

Furoshiki refers to both the square cloth itself and the wrapping technique. The word doesn't mean gift wrap or anything like it: "'Furo' of furoshiki is bath. 'Shiki' is a sheet," says Irene Tsukada Simonian. She owns Bunkado, a gift shop in LA's Little Tokyo, where she sells furoshiki cloth.