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So, now that you’ve gotten past all that – what else is there to do? Now that you might finally have some time to write them, our Eco-Warrior looks at how to be green and still wish a merry Christmas to everyone you know.
Well, personally, I’ve come to the realisation that there are massive numbers of people giving me Christmas cards, to which I have no real response other than, "Um, thank you, but I haven’t written mine yet." But if you want to be eco-friendly, should you even write Christmas cards at all?
Well, first of all, every Christmas, we use up over 200,000 trees to make the cards we send our family, friends, neighbours, and people we sort of barely knew about five years ago. In 2004, we sent around 744 million cards – so that’s quite a lot of little cartoon snowmen, over-glittery nativities and breathtakingly bad card poems floating around – and massive of proportions of them went in the bin on January 6th.
One solution to that is sending e-cards, which don’t need to be recycled at all. You might try the free selections at Blue Mountain or go to Friends of the Earth’s own website, where you can send a card showing snowmen protesting against global warming – an influential movement, I’m sure. You could also try the brilliant Jib Jab where you can put the faces of your friends and yourself into videos of dancing disco elves and remakes of It’s a Wonderful Life, amongst other things.
On the other hand, if you happen to know anyone who, like my mum, doesn’t check their emails for six months at a time, then e-cards aren’t that great an option. Unless you’re willing to send a ‘Happy June 25th’ card. Another way of being more eco-friendly with your cards is to send recycled ones. Many charity shops, including Oxfam, stock recycled cards, so you can give money to charity as well as saving trees. Grow-a-Note cards, at Green Field Paper, take the idea of recycled cards even further – the cards themselves are made from 100% recycled paper, but they’re also embedded with wildflower seeds. When it comes to the end of the Christmas season, you can take the card into the garden and quite literally plant the whole thing: the recycled paper then acts as mulch for the seeds.
Even if you don’t have cards that spontaneously turn themselves into gardens, you can still recycle the cards you do have. Either put them into your paper recycling bag along with everything else you usually would, or take them down to W.H. Smith, Tesco, Marks and Spencers, or TK Maxx, where the Woodland Trust is running their annual Christmas Card Recycling Scheme from the 2nd to the 31st January. Recycling your cards there will raise money for the Woodland Trust, and if everyone recycles just one card each, they’ll have enough money to plant 15,000 new trees in the UK.
Oh, and one last thing: merry Christmas!
The best thing we can realistically do for the environment is to seal our corpses in non-biodegradable containers and promptly cease vital activities. This prevents the release of countless litres of green house gases, and ozone damaging isotopes, etc.
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