Two Greener Christmas Card Solutions

This post is a part of A Greener Christmas Guide, a series of posts dedicated to celebrating the holidays with a lighter impact on the earth.  For more of this series, please visit A Greener Christmas Guide.

Almost 300,000 trees are cut down every year to produce Christmas cards in the United States.  Then there are all the nasty inks, fixing agents, and chemicals that make our cards look oh-so-pretty (and become oh-so-toxic).  We look at them for maybe ten minutes, toss them in a basket or on our mantels with fifty other cards for the holiday, and throw them out, right?

The problem is that while many of us may be recycling the Christmas cards that we get, we aren’t turning around and buying cards and paper products made with recycled materials.  It’s like a diet: you can’t lose weight by just exercising or just eating better.  You have to do both.  You have to recycle, and you have to buy recycled products.

Unfortunately, finding cards made out of recycled paper is really REALLY hard.  I can’t even find printer paper made with a reasonable amount of post-consumer content most of the time, and that should be such a basic product in the US.  Instead, 93% of our paper comes from virgin trees.  It’s no wonder you can’t find cards made with post-consumer content.  Just so you know, the third largest industrial emitter of global warming pollution… is the virgin timber-based pulp and paper industry.  How sad.  We’re cutting down trees and generating pollution instead of reusing the stuff we’ve got.
 

1. Get Greener With Digital Christmas Cards

I don’t know about you, but that’s reason enough for our family to forgo the tradition of mailing Christmas cards.  We’re sending digital Christmas cards instead.  Everyone checks their email, and with the unlimited storage capacity of our computers these days,  it’s a great way to keep down clutter in your house and hold onto the digital card.  I’ve done the same with bridal shower and Thanksgiving party invitations and birthday cards, and the results have been packed houses and happy recipients with no waste.

To make my cards, here’s what I like to do:

  1. insert pictures and text into a Pages document (the Mac equivalent to Microsoft Word that is more graphic-oriented)
  2. save my document as a pdf so that everyone sees the page exactly as I designed it
  3. attach the page to an email with a clear subject like “Sarah, won’t you join us this Thanksgiving?” and leave the text of my message blank 

People will probably say that I don’t have the sentiment to put together the time and money to mail real cards with my real signature.  But I do care.  It’s just that my sentiment for Mother Earth is so strong that I can’t justify the waste of paper, chemicals, and fuel to deliver my card.  If every family in American sent just one Christmas card less, we’d save 50,000 cubic yards of waste every year.  In case you’re curious, that’s enough paper to fill my house… 325 times.
 

2. Don’t Want to Go Digital?

If mailing Christmas cards is one tradition that you just Cannot Skip, please, oh please consider looking for cards that are:

  1. made with recycled paper (the higher the post-consumer content percentage, the better)
  2. made with soy- or vegetable-based inks
  3. chlorine-free

But watch out!  Sometimes paper products will say “made with recycled products” or something like that.  You have to check just how much of the product is actually recycled materials… are we talking 3% or 90%?  That’s quite the difference in chopped down trees, wouldn’t you say?

We have two grandmothers around the age of 90 who will be getting our only two “real” holiday cards in the mail.  I think we’ll go with one of these green companies; I love what they offer.  Check them out:

  1. Tree-Free Greetings 
  2. Green Field Paper Company
  3. Seltzer Goods

I will be linking this article to my Christmas cards to explain to our friends and family why we have decided to send cards by email.  Please feel free to link to this article if you chose to go digital this year as well (and add us to your holiday mailing list!). 

If you would like to be added to my Christmas mailing list, drop a line below.  Cards built on the computer are too much fun.

Happy Holidays!  Happy Green Holidays.