With about 180 million individual cards to be exchanged (excluding packaged children’s cards), this holiday is heavy on paper cardstock. Despite the tons of paper used for this holiday, Valentine’s Day represents only about 12.5% of the 7 billion U.S. greeting cards sold annually. With Hallmark and American Greetings controlling over 80% of the market, anything these companies do to make greeting cards more eco-friendly does have immediate “green impact”. Thankfully, both companies do offer cards with recycled content. With about 30% of all greeting cards containing some recycled content, over 1 million trees are saved annually. Marketing cards made from 100% recycled paper, American Greeting’s Recycled Paper Greetings www.recycledpapergreetings.com is the “green card” leader. Buy a greeting card with recycled content and you will not only be saying to your Valentine, “How do I love thee?” , you will be letting these corporate purveyors of messages hear, “Let me count the trees”.

Saving our trees by using recycled paper to produce greeting cards must be supported by recycling the cards that are gifted. Greeting cards can be recycled wherever “mixed paper” is accepted. Since most municipalities accept “mixed paper”, please remember to recycle all your cards that are not personal keepsakes. If your municipality or hauler does not accept “mixed paper”, you have until February 28th to send your Valentine’s Day cards to St. Jude’s Ranch for Children. For 34 years, St. Jude’s has accepted used greeting card fronts and works with children to trim the cards and glue them onto pre-printed card backs. These refurbished cards are then packaged and sold by the charity. According to their website, “The benefits are two-fold; customers receive “green” holiday cards for use and the children receive payment for their work and learn the benefits and importance of “going green”. It is St. Jude’s commitment to “break the vicious welfare cycle and to teach the children to learn to earn”, they pay each child fifteen cents for each card made. While the program does not specifically create cards purposed for Valentine’s Day, this 34 year old program will use “anything…that starts with a used greeting card front. For a small postage fee you will be supporting a charity that has helped millions of children. To learn more about this greeting card recycling program, please visit their website at: www.stjudesranch.org

A favorite among Valentine’s Day gifts is the heart-shaped box filled with chocolates. Chocolates presented in individual wrappings, placed inside a cardboard carton which is then wrapped in cellophane just seem to make for a beautiful presentation! Today, even our favorite candy bar brands are specially wrapped to bring in the holiday. And, a chocolate lover’s holiday it is. In 2009, 58 million pounds of chocolate sold for Valentine’s Day. Wrap, wrap, and wrap! Who’s counting? I don’t deny that wrapping serves not only as candy “fashion”, but also enables mechanized production and helps to maintain product freshness, but when is the wrapping too much? When the wrapping does not incorporate any recycled content and is itself not recyclable- that’s overwrapped chocolate! Since most candy wrappers are wax-coated or made of layered adhered materials (paper, foil, and plastic) they are not recyclable. Plastic-coated, color inked-paper laminates may grab our attention for a few seconds at retail, but ultimately these super packaged eye-catchers end up sitting in our landfills for hundreds of years. A quote from, A Century of Candy Bars, by David Grager, is definitely some food for thought, “The simple sheet of paper used to protect our favorite candy bar, an item we rarely think about or consciously notice, one that we immediately throw into the trash, may tell us more about ourselves than we realize”. Not so sweet a thought?! Help may be on the way. Some emerging technologies may one day make wrapper recycling a reality. Material reclamation technology being developed by Polyflow Corp www.plyflow.uuuq.com and plasma technology used for aseptic brick recycling may one day be used to recycle candy wrappers. (To read more about recycling aseptic packages visit: www.www.recygal.com/2010/01/19/tetra-pak%c2%ae-building-a-foundation-for-carton-recycling-with-aseptic-bricks/#more-1453).

Despite the current lack of wrapper recycling, there is no reason why candy cartons and elements of candy wrappers cannot be made with recycled content. The food grade recycled cartons and papers available to candy producers are not widely used. Surprisingly, even many organic chocolate manufacturers do not place emphasis on the eco-friendliness of their packaging. Shameful! Since packaging is fashion and the confectionery industry follows trends, the current greening of America should eventually gain momentum in the candy arena too. In the meantime, at least recycle your candy cartons. Every carton we keep out of a landfill helps to save trees. And, of course, you can always support companies like TerraCycle® who make wonderful items out of reclaimed materials like candy wrappers. Visit www.terracycle.net to learn more about their efforts and how you can participate.

The No.1 gift associated with Valentine’s Day is a bouquet of roses. This year, over 100 million roses will be sold for the holiday. With growing, packaging and shipping all taking tolls on the environment you may want to consider sending an organically grown bouquet. An online purveyor of organic flowers, Organic Bouquet, offers flowers grown to meet certified guidelines for sustainable crop production, ecosystem protection, fair labor practices, community benefits, and product quality. All orders are packaged using recycled and recyclable materials. To atone for the carbon footprint generated by shipping, the carbon emissions from each shipment are “offset by rolling funds into the Nicaragua Restoration Project”. Over a forty year period, this project will sequester more than 150,000 tons of carbon dioxide by reforesting over 850 acres of abandoned pastures with native trees. Check out www.organicbouquet.com for your floral needs.

As Valentine’s Day fast approaches and soon leaves us for another year, let’s try and keep all our holiday traditions as green and as renewable as possible. Please submit any suggestions you may have to keep our gifting greener; we can all learn from each other. Happy Valentine’s Day!

© 2010 Recycle Life, LLC
The RecyGal^TM and the RecyGal character, logo are trademarks of Recycle Life , LLC

References for this article were obtained from: www.recycledgreetingcards.com, “Environmental Info”, USAID, Expro El Salvador, Program for Export Promotion, for the Micro, Small, and Mid-Size Businesses, San Salvador 7, July 7, 2005, www.grinningplanet.com , “Congratulations!..On Overpaying for the Greeting Card”, February 8, 2005, www.emotioncards.com, “The History of Greeting Cards”, www.poemhunter.com, “How Do I Love Thee”, Elizabeth Barret Browning, www.slashfood.com , “Why we Give Candy on Valentine’s Day, H. Raskin, February 4, 2010, www.earth911.com, “Recycling Mysteries: Candy Wrappers”, B. Hammad, May 18, 2009, www.www.underconsideration.com, “A Century of Candy Bars- An Analysis of Wrapper Design”, David Crager, The Gazette, “Valentine’s roses bloom by the millions”, D. Wilson, February 11, 2000, PR Newswire, “Organic Roses on Valentines Say ‘ I love you and the earth too!’”, January 25, 2005, www.organicbouquet.com

The gift wrap industry is a big one; estimated annual sales are between $2.6 and $2.7 billion. According to Earth911, “wrapping paper and shopping bags alone account for about 4 million tons of trash annually”. Why trash? All gift wrap is simply not recyclable- many papers are coated with plastics, strewn with glitter, or laminated in foil. Unfortunately, these blended papers end up adding to our landfills. When looking for gift wrap, choose uncoated, printed papers that can be recycled. To be even more “green” use gift wrap made from recycled paper that is itself recyclable. There are several on-line retailers which offer eco-friendly gift wrap; sites like http://www.pristineplanet.com which allow you to price compare gift wrap. And, don’t forget when collecting the spent gift wrap to rip off the cellophane tape, it makes the paper non-recyclable.


Besides gift wrap concerns, items ordered on-line bring additional outer and inner packaging with them. Recently, I purchased two document type gifts from a well known internet retailer. Because my customer information is stored in the company’s database, the shopping experience went quickly and without a snag. (No waiting in a long cashier’s line, no hauling bags around the mall). Talk about avoiding stress, technology is a great thing!! Anyway, the two “same topic” items (a one page laminated quick tip guide and a thin manual) arrived at my home in separate cartons on different days. Together the items could have packed neatly in one manila envelope, yet the packaging was 10 times larger than the unbreakable products!! A bit excessive don’t you think? While the front end of my shopping experience was positive, the back end was somewhat negative. Although my gifts arrived intact and on time, the excessive packaging (the manual was also fully wrapped in plastic around a corrugated back board) put a damper on my gift giving enthusiasm. The packaging used to get the gifts to my home (for further packaging) was over the top. On a more positive note, at least one of the packing cartons was made from recycled corrugated. Fortunately, for me, the more eco-friendly carton was printed with, “Rate this packaging:” and a web address was listed. You bet I rated the entire shipping experience. We need to let retailers know that as customers we care about the impact their operations have on the environment. As for my gift, it is now being given without wrap; I can’t bear to add anything more to it.


To wrap it up, I must add that so far I have avoided Styrofoam peanuts. If the holidays bring these drain clogging polluters your way, please contact “The Plastic Loose Fill Council” http://www.loosefillpackaging.com or phone: 800-826-2214 and find a drop-off reuse/recycle location near you. “Hum”, let’s keep these “Buggers” out of the waste stream. Happy Packaging!


© 2009 Recycle Life, LLC
The RecyGal^TM and the RecyGal character, logo are trademarks of Recycle Life , LLC

References for this article were obtained from:
www.earth911,“Wrap’sody of Wraps” Gifts & Decorative Accessories, 1998, www.loosefillpackaging.com