One of my faithful readers asked me if gift cards were recyclable. The answer has been no for a while. The plastic in credit cards and gift cards usually ends up in the garbage and it is PVC, so not readily handled by recyclers. So what is a green minded individual to do? There is one great option that I know about. Enter Earthworks. Earthworks is a simple concept that is a brilliant idea. They melt down old PVC cards and create new ones. I first read about them on the Mother Earth Network. Did you know that 10 billion new gift cards are printed every year with the potential to add 75-100 pounds of PVC to the waste stream? And with he popularity of gift cards the number goes up every year. Earthworks can take those empty gift cards, old credit cards, ID’s grocery program cards, etc and make new ones out of them. Here is a brief reprint from the Mother Earth article:
It absolutely does not create any waste. It’s a really simple process that involves securely destroying the material by chopping it up and then melting the plastic down. There’s no chemical waste because we don’t use any chemicals in the process, which a lot of post-consumer products need in order to clean the material. The other great thing is that recycling a card and making it into a new one saves about 80 percent of the energy that would be used to make a brand new card. That’s because our product is made from 100 percent recycled materials with no raw materials and no petroleum.
So yes, readers, there is an answer. Consumers can send in their old cards, and retailers can collect their old gift cards to sell for scrap. Now that the holidays are over, for the price of a stamp you can keep your share of the 10 billion gift cards out of the landfill and put them back into circulation. If you work for a store, show them the Earthworks website and encourage them to use collect old cards and buy the recycled sheets for their own cards.
