For presents that are going to be opened at home, we always wrap in pieces of cloth.  It looks nice, it's easy to remove, and it can be reused next year, none the worse for the wear.  Gift bags have similar virtues.

You can, of course, wrap presents to be given away in this fashion, but you'll want to make sure your recipient will either keep the cloth for future use, or return it to you.

Outdated maps make great giftwrap, too; chances are, your local public transport system changes every so often (and what are the chances of your going to Vienna again before the system changes?). I once wrapped a present for my Dad in part of an old Chicago el map, which delighted him since he grew up there.

I generally have a hard time feeling like people won't think I'm some kind of crackpot dirty hippie if I wrap a gift in recycled or alternative material, but this year I gave some horsie gifts to my barn friends (solar-powered electric fence chargers, because I knew they'd never shell out the 100% extra for the non-plugin ones on their own, so it was really a disguised environmental contribution, and I got to get credit for generosity too!).  

Seeing as how it's a barn, we have tons of stuff laying around from feed sacks and baling twine.  I cut up feed sacks for wrapping paper, with a bunch of strips looped and taped together for a bow, and the one other gift I got (a hay cart, and yes, horsepeople are weird, but useful gifts are always the best) ended up with a big baling twine bow on the handle.

Speaking of feed sacks, I generally use them for trash, but when I have too many, which I usually do, I don't know what to do with them.  They're multi-layer paper sacks, and for most grain products the horses eat, the inner layer is plasticized (like dog food bags, basically).  The few that are all brown paper--like beet pulp bags--I think can probably be recycled or composted, but what the heck should I do with the others?  It's only two or three a month, but I thought maybe if I save them up I could use them for mulch the way people use newspaper, if the plastic wouldnt' hurt the plants.  The bag says "printed with soy-based ink," so I'm not all that worried about the inks, I don't think (should I be?).

Not that this is anyone's biggest eco-problem.

Since many kinds of potting soil contain little styrofoam bits, I can't see as how the plastic would be all that bad, provided it was chopped up well enough.

I typically separate the layers and then dispose of them accordingly.  The layer with the plastic goes in the trash, and the others get composted or burned.  

Two items I've happily used to wrap gift in are the beautiful covers to children's books, and the old calendars I have trouble bringing myself to throw away.  They also could be used to decorate the top of a gift wrapped in plain brown or white paper.

And, the perfect source for recycled gift tags are last year's Christmas cards cut up into little rectangles & folded.  Sometimes you can get really lucky and cut out a piece that will fold properly with the pretty picture right on top of the tag, and no writing on the back.  Other times you just have to make it an abstract design out of snowy, wintry colors.  But I learned this trick about 20 years ago from a housemate, and have hardly ever bought gift tags since.