April 1st, 2009 by Solange

The US market is the largest for greeting cards: there were about 9 billion greeting card units sold in 2007. The amazing phenomenon is that despite the rise of the electronic greeting cards the traditional card market is still going strong. So how green is the greeting card market?

The answer is not very; first there is the sheer bulk of the industry, by 2009 worldwide sales of Christmas/New Year Cards are projected to exceed 7.68 billion units. Then if  you look carefully many of the large companies are not yet using 100% recycled paper for their product. Last but not least there is the environmental impact of the transport, some companies are now thinking to relocate their production line to Europe or the US from China under the consumer’s pressure of the and the raising price of production. Moverover a card is not just a card it is also the package, cellophane is definitely not green at all. Research is being done by smaller companies which will use packages made from soya.

Because the environment counts and without going over board there are a few things we can do, to be greener when using the snail post:

Step 1: Before buying choose recycle and tree-free greeting card; but be aware, the labelling can be confusing. “Recycled” may  mean that a mix of trees and recycled paper has been used. The minimum you want is “recycled paper” that ensure that cards are made from waste which otherwise would have ended up in the landfill these cards  will still have a small percentage of paper rolls.
A better choice is to pick cards that are tree- free, they are made from mix of seed species that will grow in all regions of the US when planted. When a business pays that level of attention to the paper it will also have looked into the ink using vegetable-based ink.

Step 2 : make sure that we re-use our greeting cards, after a big holiday or a big family celebration, I take time to separate my cards into 2 categories. The first will go direct to the recycling bin, the second I will reuse by cutting and pasting the whole card of part of them so that old becomes new.

However the greenest way to send your sentiment is definitely e cards.