GreenYour.com

Switching from traditional greeting cards to e-cards is the best eco-option for saving trees but choosing tree-free greeting cards ranks high as it helps limit the number of trees that are cut down each year to make paper.

Find it! Tree-free greeting cards

Choosing tree-free greeting cards helps you go green because...

• They are made from rapidly renewable plants or other sources, so no trees need to be cut down.
• The process of producing greeting cards from these sources requires less energy and chemicals than conventional wood-based greeting cards.

The average household purchases 30 cards each year. All told, Americans buy almost 7 billion greeting cards annually.[1] Line up those 7 billion cards with the more than 2 billion cards bought in the UK and they would encircle the globe 54 times.[2] So although greeting cards aren't large in size, their sheer volume has a tremendous environmental impact.[3] Like most forms of paper, greeting cards affect the environment adversely during their disposal and production alike, initially consuming virgin resources (trees, water, fuel) before ending up in landfills as part of the approximately 83 million tons of paper waste generated by Americans each year.[4]

An alternative to timber-based pulp and paper are greeting cards produced from a variety of other renewable materials, the most prominent being agricultural crops. That's because these fiber sources grow rapidly, the harvesting is much gentler to ecosystems than foresting, and the processing of the fibers to produce pulp requires less energy and chemicals compared to tree fibers.[5] Crops grown specifically for paper-making include kenaf, hemp, jute, and flax, while residues from agricultural crops such as sugar cane husk and the straws left over from wheat, rye, oats, rice, and barley are also a resource.[6] Banana paper, handmade from the bark of the banana tree stem, looks delicate but is strong.[7] Lotka paper comes from the skin of the daphne plant, which grows in the highlands of Nepal. It is harvested when it's a sapling stick that stands 5 to 7 feet high and once cut it begins to grow again.[8]

Christmas tops the list of the most popular card-sending holiday with more than 60 percent of all individual cards sold around that time.[1] Nearly 300,000 trees are cut down to serve as raw material for Christmas cards; the quantity of cards sold would fill a football field 10 stories high.[9] But if all Americans trimmed their card list by only one card, or substituted it for a tree-free greeting card, the savings would amount to 50,000 cubic yards of paper.[10]

External links

• The Grinning Planet - Congratulations! ... On Overpaying For This Greeting Card
• TreeFree Paper - Tree Free 101