The gift-card conundrum: Convenience with an environmental cost

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This week:

• The gift-card conundrum: Convenience with an environmental cost
• Which banks are investing a many in hoary fuel development?
• Readers yield some-more immature gift-giving options

The gift-card conundrum: Convenience with an environmental cost

In a callout for greener gifting ideas, some readers suggested present certificates for things like a show, a grill or, some-more traditionally, a store.

Gift cards can be a good last-minute option, and they’re unequivocally renouned — in fact, they were a many renouned holiday present in a new online consult of Canadians, some-more than half of whom designed to buy present cards for their desired ones.

But they, too, have an environmental impact. Many present cards are finished of PVC plastic, that is tough to recycle and isn’t supposed by many recycling systems.

While they’re tiny and slim, their recognition means they supplement adult — in 2014, dual billion present cards were purchased in a U.S. alone, according to an estimate by a consulting organisation A.T. Kearney.

Giftrocket, a association that offers e-gift cards, estimates that any earthy label contains about 5 grams of PVC and generates 21 grams of CO2. That means in total, present cards combined 10,000 tonnes of PVC rubbish and 42,000 tonnes of CO2 in a U.S. alone in 2014.

So, what to do? Here are some options:

• Some retailers, like Starbucks and Whole Foods, offer recyclable label present cards (see above photo).

• Many others offer present cards that can be printed onto a square of paper.

• E-gift cards can be sent around email and printed out or redeemed online or from your phone.

• Some tiny businesses only keep a note of credit that we can redeem when we get to a store.

• If we have a cosmetic present label that you’ve already spent, we can mostly reload it and re-gift it to someone else.

If we unequivocally wish to recycle present cards after regulating them and have a approach of collecting a large volume, they can be recycled by a association named Terracycle, that specializes in recycling materials that routinely aren’t recyclable. The association charges $91 to recycle a “small” box (25 x 25 x 46 centimetres) full of cosmetic cards.

Some Canadian municipalities — for example, Strathcona in Alberta and Niagara Region in Ontario — concede people to dump off spent present cards during certain depots for recycling. (The Municipality of Strathcona uses Terracycle as a present label recycler.)

Whatever we select to do, consider about what a present label or certificate can be used to buy — a environmental impact of that squeeze is substantially many bigger than that of a label itself.

— Emily Chung

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Old issues of What on Earth? are right here.

The Big Picture: Fossil fuel financing

This week, American investment hulk Goldman Sachs pledged to stop financing oil and gas drilling projects in a Arctic, as good as new thermal spark growth worldwide. This is a poignant spin of events, given a pivotal purpose banks play in a growth of vital hoary fuel projects, be they oil and gas fields or spark mines. (As partial of a new announcement, Goldman Sachs also committed to investing $750 billion in tolerable ventures over a subsequent decade.) Here’s a demeanour during a institutions that invested a many worldwide in hoary fuel projects final year — you’ll notice it includes 3 Canadian ones.

Hot and bothered: Provocative ideas from around a web

• Natural gas is mostly touted as a “cleaner” hoary fuel, and oil and gas companies typically downplay a methane that can trickle into a atmosphere in a descent process. The New York Times reports that a Feb 2018 blowout during an Ohio gas good run by an ExxonMobil subsidiary, that lasted 20 days, “released some-more methane than a whole oil and gas industries of many nations do in a year.”

• We all know that beavers are sedulous small critters, and that a dams they build are wonders of engineering. New investigate suggests these structures can be pivotal in staving off wildfire repairs along rivers. Basically, a researchers found that a channels beavers puncture keep a surrounding foliage wet, and so improved stable from a ravages of fire.

• While some Canadian provinces are still fighting a sovereign government’s CO tax, the adults of Germany have been agitating for a aloft levy — and a 16 informal governments there have concluded to a horizon that would some-more than double a taxation on CO dioxide emissions from ride and heating.

• In a interests of finale a year on a certain note, Michael Liebreich, a comparison writer during Bloomberg New Energy Finance, published a blog post entitled “Peak Emissions Are Closer Than You Think.” Reflecting on a swell of a final decade, he argues that trends like a steep cost decrease of renewable appetite and battery packs as good as flourishing recognition of appetite potency will assist massively in assisting a universe decarbonize in a subsequent decade.

More immature present ideas from readers

This might be a final emanate of a year, yet there’s still time to arrange out your gift-giving decisions, that is because we wanted to share a few some-more suggestions from readers for environmentally obliged options.

Kenn Hazen wrote that “since 1964, we have been doing Christmas differently.” His concept? Choosing gifts from present catalogues and afterwards giving a label to a desired ones “to tell them what we did.” 

Hazen pronounced that “over a years, I’ve bought collection to assistance a bad rancher grow produce; pigs and chickens for an institution in Uganda to assistance them be self-sufficient; soccer balls to assistance child victims of adult wars learn how to play again; and propagandize reserve so Third World kids could go to school.”

He pronounced a “ideas are unconstrained if we wish to get in on a genuine definition of Christmas and be a good universe citizen.”

Virginia Crawford asked us to pass along a present she gave her father for Christmas in 2018: CO offsets. 

“He is ardent about a meridian predicament and amicable probity and it’s his life’s work as a United Church apportion in Halifax. To element this work, for his gift, we took a closer demeanour during a domicile CO2 emissions for 2018 and equivalent them by shopping CO offsets via 2019 (it was too costly to do in one shot). He was so happy with a present and he speedy me to tell a story to others.”

Kiirsti Owen pronounced she is a large proponent of shopping things second-hand. “I consider there’s this uncanny thought out there that gifts contingency be new. I’ve bought unequivocally good design frames from used stores. Books are another easy one to buy used. The object isn’t any reduction profitable to a receiver, and it’s some-more affordable for a buyer!”

Susan Carlton weighed in with some jacket ideas, yet nothing some-more strange than a desirable story from final year involving her son-in-law. He “drilled a hole in a coconut, emptied it, afterwards wrote a present (a use or experience) on a square of paper and extrinsic a paper into a hole. The target afterwards had to pound open a coconut with a hammer.” (Carlton remarkable that a family has “also finished this with a balloon” — yet presumably but a hammer.)

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Editor: Andre Mayer | Logo design: Sködt McNalty

Article source: https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/what-on-earth-newsletter-gift-card-holidays-1.5402807?cmp=rss