Does Green Greeting Cards Mean E-Greeting Cards?
by April Streeter, Gothenburg, Sweden 
on 11.18.08
The short and sweet answer is yes.
One of those "will-you or won't-you?" questions this season may well be around holiday greeting cards. Sending no cards at all is obviously the greenest option, but not very festive. If you've always sent paper-based cards, you may feel that guilty tug to continue the tradition. If you are dedicated to sending e-cards...continue! Which type of greeting is greener - e-cards or paper-based? That question's not quite as fraught with difficulty as the old "paper versus plastic" conundrum. E-cards are more energy-efficient than paper cards. However, having options is always good, so hit the jump to see two great choices.
FSC recycled-paper cards
Cards like those by Pleasantrees are not only made with recycled-content (30 and up to 100%) but also FSC-certified paper. Pleasantrees also promises it will plant THREE trees (through American Forests, i.e. in the U.S.) for each order of cards purchased. (Minimum price for cards is around $1.99 each and up if individualized messages are printed inside the cards). That's a pretty good deal if you must send cards from your business, and Pleasantrees has lots of different motifs to choose from.
However, paper cards, even if they are 100% recycled-content and/or from FSC paper, generate CO2 emissions associated not only with the making of the paper, and the sending of the product to you, but also with you sending the individual cards out. Creative Citizen estimates you'll save five pounds of waste, 1,000 pounds of emissions and 1,000 kilowatt hours if you forgo sending 50 cards or invites in a year.
E-Cards save energy, rainforests, bees!
We use the same 50-card quantity to estimate and compare the energy, emissions and waste of e-cards. If you are sending 50 cards, that will probably take approximately 2-5 minutes per card to pick and address, so let's estimate 2-3 hours of computer usage time to send out the cards. According to Mr. Electricity, the average laptop computer uses 65 - 250 watts. The calculator at the Mr. Electricity site shows a laptop using about the equivalent of .1 kWh for 150 minutes of usage, and an average of 1.37 lbs CO2/hour. Those 3-4 lbs of CO2 and pennies of electricity are dwarfed by the amounts Creative Citizen calculates, even if the comparisons are only approximately equivalent.
For a wide selection of holiday-themed e-cards, head over to care2, where each card generates a donation by the organization to "save" a square foot of rainforest. It is a little hard to know whether a square foot of rainforest is better than three trees, but an e-card is definitely more eco than a paper card.
If you are going for an e-cards, perhaps you'd like to give just a little bit more to those special people...and donate to teach 58 children in Gambia the art of beekeeping? Or send a goat to Haitians? GlobalGiving lets you decide the amount of the gift, which is nice, and then sends an e-card to the recipient and lets them choose a project to donate the money to. Happy holiday making. Via: Pleasantrees and Care2 and GlobalGiving
Read more
Plant a Tree With Tree Greetings
Saving the World One Paperless Greeting Card at a Time
Red Stamp Introduces New Greeting Cards by Round Robin Press
Follow @TreeHugger on Twitter & get our headlines with @TH_rss!
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With mokugift e-cards you plant a tree with EACH ecard. Each tree absorbs an average of 26 pounds of carbon dioxide per year for it life. That more than cover the carbon footprint of an ecard. That is a net increase in trees. Whereas saving rainforest is great but does not lead to a net increase in trees.
At $1 per tree, mokugift is often cheaper than paper based greeting cards
fun fact: moku means 'tree' in Japanese and 'island' in Hawaiian.
last year i was doing some research and found out that Americans were projected to spend $840 billion (yeah, with a B) on christmas cards and that the equivalent of 244,000 trees were felled for the paper to make those cards. that's a big, huge, WTF?!
so yeah, i think ecards rock too! care2 has some of the best i've seen.
For those wanting to send cards, postcards are a good option to consider. They essentially use half the paper of a regular card and don't require envelopes. Plus, they can easily be hand-made out of recycled materials and they're cheaper to mail.
and let's not forget the possibility of recycled, reusable cards-- you can make your own by reusing stuff around your house, sew or glue in a pocket and tuck in your personal note instead of writing on the card itself. Your recipient gets a note from you and a card that can be used over and over again. Make your own or check with local crafters or on sites like etsy.
"According to Mr. Electricity, the average laptop computer uses 140-330 watts, or about the equivalent of .1 kWh for 150 minutes of usage, "
Not a chance. Using 140 W for 150 minutes is .35 kWh, so clearly that math is wrong.
Also, most laptop chargers/power supplies have a peak output of 65W, and even most very high powered laptops have a peak power consumption of less than 100W.
On the other hand, desktops can definitely be much higher... but if you're just online, you aren't really using much graphics or CPU power, so unless you've got a really old system or a CRT monitor, or dozens of power-intensive programs running in the background, 150W should be more than enough.
------author replies -------
thanks, Anthony. That should say, computer, not laptop computer.
If you send e-cards, nobody will get them. Doesn't everyone just assume all e-cards are viruses anyway? It'd make sense, seeing as most e-card emails do indeed contain viruses.
----- author replies ------
This is an interesting idea...could you back it up with some kind of stats or link for readers?
I create cards for a fun alternative e-card site, Banjo Bunny E-cards. You'll find inspired, creative and humorous cards for the season featuring high-end flash animation. I'd be so grateful if you took a peek.
wishing you abundance,
Susan
Uh, Google for "e-card virus" (without the quotes). You'll get the hint. I'd be surprised to find a spam filter that *didn't* strip most e-cards. I've certainly never had an e-card reach my inbox this century. They've always been filtered to Spam.
Write Hook.com is a newly launched greeting card company - All cards are FSC certified and are made from 100% post consumer recycled paper (as are their envelopes) using wind powered energy and printed with Vegetable-based inks.. A customer can create and customize a card from the comfort of his/her computer and then that card is mailed directly to a recipient or to the purchaser. Five cents from every card purchased is donated to designated non-profits from which the customer can choose. Write Hook combines original photography and graphic design with sentiments and prose that create a witty, unique and fresh twist on the traditional genre of greeting cards. Write Hook has created what they call a “Half-Note” - a flat card that uses half the amount of paper as a traditional greeting card but still has all of the art, message, and impact of a traditional greet. All art and the majority of copy is original to Write Hook. And with Write Hook, a customer can upload/create an address book, set up email reminders for dates, and create cards up to a year in advance and choose future mail out dates. Write Hook is able to do business to business as well. The company was started by two Milwaukee women who wanted to make a difference in the lives of other people and in the community at large. The video on the home page of the site explains their philosophy and why they began the company. As a busy professional, this site is wonderful. As a guy who forgets dates, Write Hook is brilliant.
I own an ecard and invitations site, designed with colorful people in mind. (http://www.cowriecards.com) One of my motivations was to provide green alternative to hard cards.
This along with using hard cards made from post-consumer recycled content is certainly the more sustainable way of sending your sentiments.