ALEXANDRIA, Va., Dec. 19 (UPI) -- Each year the 2.65 billion holiday cards sold in the United States could fill a football field 10 stories high and several more football fields could be filled with used wrapping paper not to mention the rivers of ribbon and piles of plastic peanuts.

"From Thanksgiving to New Year's Day, Americans throw away 25 percent more solid waste than any other time of the year," Patricia Imperato, executive director of the Pennsylvania Resource Council, told United Press International. "This amounts to 25 million tons of extra garbage."

But those trying to buy recycled holiday cards and wrapping paper are out of luck because despite state laws passed in the late 1980s to increase recycling and the recycling content of paper purchased by the government, few holiday items with recycled paper can be found.

"The country was poised in the early 1990s to increase the amount of recycled paper content and several recycling paper mills were built but a flood of global virgin pulp entered the market," Michael Alexander, spokesman for the National Recycling Coalition in Alexandria, Va., told UPI. "That virgin pulp resulted in all of the new recycling pulp mills closing and less recycled office paper and specialty paper from which Christmas cards are made."

Recycled newspapers are going toward newsprint or cardboard, but finding copying paper with a recycled paper content is tough and often more expensive than virgin paper and the same goes for Christmas cards and wrapping paper, according to Alexander.

Susan Kinsella, executive director of Conservatree in California, said that office paper containing recycled paper has gone from 10 percent of the market to 5 percent of the market because corporate demand for recycled products decreased .She pointed out that 1 ton (40 cartons) of 30 percent post-consumer content copier paper saves 7.2 trees.

The decline in demand from the business sector makes it difficult for consumers to find recycled paper products, Kinsella said. "An exception I discovered was Sally Foster wrapping paper that my daughter and her school were selling this year as a fundraiser." Rolls of 40 sq. ft. of the wrapping paper is sold at up to $8 a roll by school children and 50 percent of the wrapping paper revenue is given to the school for computers, field trips and other programs.

Bill Sheehan of GrassRoots Recycling Network, in Athens, Ga. said that the reason virgin paper is cheaper than recycled paper is because of a century of tax credits to paper companies.

"While people have been good about recycling their garbage they assume that as a result the products they purchase are going to involve recycled content. While that is true in newspapers and cardboard it is not with other paper," Sheehan told UPI.

Both Imperato and Kinsella offer catalogues to purchase paper with recycled content on their Web sites. Imperato also said that people should not just buy recycled but to reduce the products used and to reuse as many things as possible. She suggests to:

-- Give non-material gifts that don't need wrapping such as tickets to cultural or sporting events, movie theater coupon books, gift certificates for a massage or charitable donations in someone's name;

-- Use color calendar pages, magazine pictures, old posters as wrapping paper or take a brown grocery bag and use a hole punch to make holes and weave yarn or ribbon to close the bag;

-- Wrap gifts in scraps of fabric, new dish towels or bandanas, scarves, or tablecloths; -- Clean out an attic and use old tins and boxes in which to present jewelry, stationery, cookies, or other small items;

-- Use gifts as gift wrap -- an oven mitt can hold kitchen tools or a backpack for books for children;

-- Consider using e-greetings instead of sending holiday cards;

-- Reuse packing boxes and shipping materials such as plastic peanuts, wood shavings and bubble wrap. One box can be mailed across the country several times before it falls apart;

-- Call the Plastic Loosefill Council's Peanut Hotline (1-800-828-2214) for the names of local businesses that will take extra plastic peanuts used in shipping.

(Reported by Alex Cukan in New York)