That’s Not A Proper Card – It’s Not Made Of Paper!
[ad_1]
That’s the comment I got from a rather miffed relative when I dared to send a digital greetings card through hyper space – rather than ‘overpay’ for yet another piece of our precious environment – manufactured into a pretty paper greetings card – dutifully wrapped in yet more paper and sent on it’s way by snail mail – talk about stuck in a rut!!
A little compassion and soul searching is needed here, me thinks – no, not for my apparent cop out of sending a digital e-card, compassion for a few trees please!
After all – what is really more important; getting a traditional card through your letter box or to live on an earth that hasn’t been raped of it’s necessary (and very beautiful) resources. Is breathing less important than getting a paper birthday card from Aunty May?
What has a tree ever done for us?
Trees give us oxygen and absorb harmful carbon dioxide – · A single mature tree can absorb carbon dioxide at a rate of 48 lbs./year and release enough oxygen back into the atmosphere to support 2 human beings!
Trees also absorb other harmful chemicals from the air such as Sulfur Dioxide (SO2), Nitrogen oxides, peroxyacetylnitrate (PAN), Ozone (O3), cadmium, chromium, nickel & lead.
Trees also protect our water and reduce land flooding. Their protective canopies break up wind,heat and rainwater and help to prevent top soil erosion and flash flooding. Tree roots absorb nutrients and chemicals that are otherwise harmful to our water, ecology and quality.
They are pretty much vital to a working environment, they nurture other growing trees & plants, recycle, provide homes & nurseries for our animals & birds, food for them and for us. Trees give us shelter and protection, beauty and definition, they brighten our days and without enough of them our world will be in a very vulnerable place!
But what do we do! – We chop them down so that we can wipe our backsides in comfort, buy new furniture (that really doesn’t have to be made from yet another tree) waste mountains and mountains of paper on packaging, junk snail mail, company promotion, printing of ‘paper copies’ of everything and – yes – the good old greetings cards.
Time to Get Real!
It’s time to prioritize, the digital revolution isn’t here just for the fun of it – though it is quite fun when you get the hang of it. Start using those pixels & megabytes instead of trees for paper, Look around you, at our fingertips we have electronic, space saving diaries, memos, document files, back up devices – even music and video, see CD pollution – phones, PDAs notebooks, laptops, computers etc etc. We need to start making proper use of our newest technology and save some trees – we need them now, in our high pollution world, more than ever!!
It’s understood that there are times when nothing but a paper card will do for someone like granny, who – apart from the fact she doesn’t own a computer let alone know how to use one and unlike most of the rest of us, saves her precious mementos and doesn’t send them to the already overflowing landfills – just wouldn’t benefit from a digital e-card but, if we all just ask one person to send us digital cards instead of paper ones – imagine how many trees that would save!
A few cold hard facts about the greetings card industry
Taking figures from only the USA and the UK, at least 9 billion greetings cards were bought last year – and most of them were disposed of!
Those that did make it to a recycling plant cost the planet more energy and pollution from transportation and conversion into reusable paper.
Creating Greetings cards means using toxic printer inks and fixing agents, and again energy and pollution in transportation – not to mention the fuel used to deliver each one!
Last but not least, using virgin paper means chopping down trees – period!
[ad_2]
Source by Donna Oxley