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Christmas Cards – what cost to the environment?

It’s traditional for businesses to say thank you to their customers at Christmas time. Thousands of cards are printed, hours are spent signing them, and then there’s the last minute rush to get them all posted before it’s too late. The financial implications of sending thousands of Christmas cards are expected and planned for, but how many businesses consider the cost to the environment?

The thousands of cards that businesses send their clients each year require a lot of paper to make, and only very few greetings card manufacturers are using recycled paper for their cards. It would be fair to say that recycled paper is not a big focus in the greetings card industry. One tree needs to be chopped down for every 3000 Christmas cards, and in the UK alone, around 1 billion Christmas cards will be sent this year [source: Defra]. That’s over 300,000 trees.

The process of making greetings cards can often include further environmentally damaging processes, such as toxic printer inks and fixing agents. Then there’s disposal of the vast quantities of cards, many of which will end up in landfill. And the carbon emissions created by transporting the cards all over the country are substantial too.

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Fight global warming by increasing soil’s organic content

An Albuquerque, New-Mexico based, non-profit company called Holistic Management International (HMI) is recommending that farmers and ranchers increase the organic content of their lands to help fight global warming. And how do they do this? They employ animal grazing techniques developed 25 years ago by HMI. The results speak for themselves. Here are photographs of the same piece of land in Zimbabwe, the first taken in September 2004, the second in May 2006.

HMI.jpg

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Questioning the UK’s environmental future

Leading scientists have come together to draw up a list of 100 leading questions facing the UK’s environmental future. The Guardian whittles these down to just eleven to cover the key issues for us.

How long does the seabed take to recover from dredging, wind farm construction and oil and gas extraction?

How does the ecological impact of UK farming compare internationally?

What are the ecological impacts of airports?

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Are we losing our green spaces?

This is something that has worried me for some time, it does seem that our remaining wildernesses are shrinking. Now a report from the Green Party is confirming my worst fears. Here is what Caroline Lucas’ office is saying:

COUNCILS in the South-East are authorizing development on green belt sites
in a bid to meet ambitious targets for new homes in the region.

Milton Keynes Council has been named by countryside campaign group the CPRE as one of the worst-performing councils in the country at ‘recycling’ land.
According to the study, which was published this week, just 13 per cent of
new developments in the council’s area were built on ‘brownfield’ sites –
the rest were on green land.

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