by Lizzy Schiller, CACC co-founder
Ninety percent of U.S. households buy greeting cards every year - this adds up to approximately 6.5 billion greeting cards in just one year alone.¹ This wild stat got us thinking! What if we could tap into the greeting card market to harness existing consumer behavior for good? If we could create sustainable greeting cards and donate 100% of our profits to other climate change non-profit organizations (NPOs), we could help climate change NPOs (and greeting card buyers) do more good in the world.
We know that there are countless climate change NPOs doing really incredible, impactful work across the globe. The problem is that these NPOs need more support to achieve the level of impact demanded to help save our planet from destruction. In 2020, US-based grant makers disbursed nearly $64 billion, but only 1.4% of this funding went towards climate change and adjacencies. Climate change specifically received 0.8% of this funding.²
"Philanthropic funding of climate-change solutions remains meager compared with the scale of the problem and the speed with which the world must act to stop climate change and the suffering it causes" ²
The Greeting Card Industry Is Not Eco-Friendly
The next time you pass by the greeting card section at your local grocery store, see how many cards you can find that are made from 100% recycled materials. You’ll be lucky if you can find any. I attempted to look up sustainability stats for the greeting card industry… but guess what? I had no luck! So, I decided to take matters into my own hands and see what I could learn by: 1) identifying the top players in the greeting card market ³, and then 2) visiting their websites to learn about their sustainability commitments. Here are my findings:
Majority of the major greeting card companies are not transparent about their sustainability efforts. More specifically, they do not publicly share on their websites the actual percentage of the cards that they produce sustainably. Avanti Press is the only company on this list (other than us) that uses recycled materials on 100% of its cards; the cards themselves contain 10% of recycled materials.
If our little non-profit has been able to figure out a way to print all of our cards using 100% recycled materials, it’s painfully obvious that greeting card behemoths like Hallmark can, too!
We are proud to offer sustainable greeting card options and hope that we can help drive positive changes in the greeting card industry through our efforts.
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