Gift Card Recycling
August 5th, 2008 by john
Plenty Magazine answers the question about how to recycle plastic store gift cards once they’re used. Before answering that question though, let’s have a look at what the cards are made of.
A few companies are using cards made of a corn-based material called Mirel, from Metabolix. These cards are actually biodegradable, so when they’re all used up just throw them in your green composting bin! Major retailers using this include Target, REI, Borders and Wal*Mart. Hopefully others will join this list and use bio-degradable plastics (it would be nice to see banks doing the same with their cards too).
Unfortunately, most of the plastic cards out there are made of PVC (polyvinyl chloride) a toxic chemical that is not usually accepted in your recycling bin. They’re pretty small though, so throwing them in the garbage can’t cause much harm can it? Well, you’re right, individually each card is pretty small, but there’s a lot of them out there. Each year 75 million pounds of PVC finds its way into US landfills. That’s a lot of PVC, so read on after the jump to find out what you can do to avoid adding to that mountain of toxic waste.
While your local municipal recycler may not accept PVC cards in their collection bins, there is a company out there that takes PVC cards (including bank cards, driving licenses etc) and will grind them up and recycle them into new sheets of PVC ready to be used to make new cards. That company is Earthworks System.
They really want banks and stores to send them the used cards in bulk, but they will also accept cards mailed in by individuals. If you’d like to mail your cards in to be recycled, simply put them in an envelope and mail them here:
Earthworks System, LLC
33200 Bainbridge Road, Suite E
Solon, OH 44139
You might also like to suggest that your local stores collect them and mail them in as well rather than just throwing them into the trash can under the cashier’s desk.
[Via Yahoo! Green]
Tags: biodegradable, gift card, mirel, pvc
Posted in Recycle, Tip |
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August 5th, 2008 at 11:53 am
Great post. I didn’t know about the biodegradable gift cards. Very interesting. I work for company that manages and tracks gift cards, and I’ve been following gift card recycling these past few months. This Post-Christmas season, I’m planning on hitting up malls and retail stores to have bins to recycle used gift cards. Hopefully Fed-ex or UPS could also sponsor free shipping to Earthworks. I’d love to get some help on that. It’s still early, but we should plan for it.