Shipping Gone Green
Written by kate - who has written 100 posts on Green Thinking Blog.
At the holidays, 3.4 billion letters are mailed, i.e. all those Christmas, Kwanzaa, and Hanukkah cards to your Aunt Gertrude in Minnesota or crazy Traveling Uncle Matt in the West Indies….
Think of the fuel consumption used to go to the store, purchase your cards, drive them back to your house, drive to the post office to buy stamps, mail out the cards that are then driven to Aunt Gertrude & flown and driven to Uncle Matt. That is a lot of fuel. USPS.com offers a calculator to actually figure out how much fuel/emissions/dollars that trip would cost.
Currently, the post office recycles 1 million tons of paper and plastic each year, but they also offer tips to Green Your Mail, and they are launching a new program to help recycle mail you just don’t want or need. The Read, Respond, Recycle Program places a locked recycling bin in each post office lobby to encourage P.O. Box owners to Read, their mail there, Respond by taking with them what they need, and Recycle the rest. To find out what post office offers this service near you, visit Earth911.com (a partner with green efforts of USPS), search “mail”, and the list will appear by zip code.
The other logical (& Kate’s preferred) option would be to send e-cards. No postage, no driving, no extra paper, no having to think that far in advance, just special holiday greetings sent right to Aunt Gertrude’s e-mail.
Some of my fave sites for free e-cards:
- Hallmark.com, (Hoops & Yo Yo cards are the selling point here for me, hint hint if you want to send me a card hehe)
- EGreetings.com (fave thing here is that Planet Earth - the most amazing DVD collection by BBC about our earth, sponsors some of the holiday e-cards)
- Blue Mountain cards (this company is great, they sponsor various charities, organizations, etc to spread awareness & find a solution).
November 30th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
This is great! Last night over dinner my husband and I were having a conversation about if we should do mailed Christmas cards this year. We agreed that we should do a friendly greeting over e-mail. Since some people think e-mailed cards are not a supplement for the real thing, I think I will do a “disclaimer” as to WHY we are doing it over it. Now the only predicament - what about our family that does not have e-mail? -L (onthefox.blogspot.com)