As the holiday season looms, corporate gifting begins its annual swell—a ritualized expression of gratitude with a price tag that defies comprehension. In the U.S. alone, companies spend over $240 billion each year on gifts for employees, clients, and partners. And yet, for all the money poured into this tradition, the gifts themselves—branded notebooks, plastic USB drives, flimsy chargers—are rarely worth keeping.
For most recipients, these items are more burden than benefit. A notebook emblazoned with a corporate logo isn’t a gift; it’s a shelf ornament waiting to be discarded or recycled. A cheaply made charger doesn’t solve a problem; it creates one when it fails within weeks. The same gadgets and trinkets, ordered in bulk and shipped en masse, often feel less like an offering of appreciation and more like evidence of a thoughtless process. The gesture itself—meant to build goodwill—is ultimately undermined by its execution.
The true weight of corporate gifting, however, extends far beyond its utility. It’s an environmental issue. The cheap plastic pens, branded stress balls, and short-lived tech accessories clutter more than desks and drawers. They fill landfills, leach chemicals into soil, and linger for centuries as microplastics in rivers and oceans. According to the EPA, plastic waste in the U.S. exceeded 35 million tons in 2021, and much of it stems from disposable or low-durability products like these.
This waste has a global footprint. Most corporate gifts are produced overseas, often in factories with limited environmental oversight, then shipped thousands of miles across carbon-intensive supply chains. Consider the branded USB drive: the raw materials are mined, refined, and manufactured, each stage consuming energy. The finished product is then packaged in plastic, shipped, gifted, and discarded—an entire chain of harm for an object that serves no lasting purpose. Multiply that by the millions distributed each holiday season, and the environmental toll becomes staggering.
It’s easy to dismiss this as an inevitable byproduct of modern business, but that’s the very problem. Corporate gifting has become so entrenched in expectation that companies rarely stop to ask what it achieves, let alone whether it aligns with their values. For businesses that publicly tout sustainability, sending plastic trinkets becomes a contradiction in terms. Appreciation can’t be genuine if it’s expressed through waste.
And yet, there’s a better way to approach this tradition. The rise of sustainable gifting practices offers a much-needed corrective, proving that corporate gifts can carry weight—both symbolically and ethically—if approached with intention. The shift begins with recognizing that less is, in fact, more.
A single, thoughtfully chosen gift can leave a far greater impression than a pile of forgettable objects. Brands that create reusable alternatives to single-use plastics produce gifts that are useful, durable, and aligned with environmental values. Companies that invest in options like these offer a blueprint for how businesses can prioritize practical items without compromising on sustainability.
Some organizations are going further, abandoning physical gifts altogether in favor of charitable giving. Donating to an environmental nonprofit, funding reforestation efforts, or sponsoring clean water initiatives on behalf of clients or employees transforms corporate gifting from an act of obligation into a force for good. A holiday card that reads, “We’ve planted 100 trees in your name,” resonates far more than another branded water bottle ever could.
The question businesses should ask is simple: does this gift add value, or does it simply add waste? An expression of gratitude should never be disposable, and corporate gifting—if it’s to mean anything at all — must reflect the thoughtfulness it claims to convey. Clients and employees are more environmentally conscious than ever, which renders sustainability no longer an afterthought but rather an expectation.
To send another round of mass-produced swag is to perpetuate a practice that no longer serves its purpose. Businesses have an opportunity to lead, to turn a tired tradition into a statement of care—not just for relationships, but for the world we share. The season of giving demands better than waste. Thoughtfulness is the rarest and most valuable gift of all.
