Carbon-Neutral Christmas Cards?

One of my favorite parts of the December holidays is shopping for the greeting cards I’ll send to family and friends. Truth be told I’ll often do this card shopping on December 26th of the previous year, when prices are dirt cheap.

Because we were traveling immediately after Christmas last year, I didn’t get to do my annual stocking up. Plus, with my new lean, green approach to living, I felt that this year I needed to have holiday cards that were appropriate to my mission–affordable and eco-friendly. Problem is in this day and age, it’s nearly impossible to find green greetings that don’t break the bank.

I looked at tons of different cards offerings and even had some samples sent to me. But between family, friends and clients, I’ve got over 100 people on my list, and nearly every “green” card option I found cost close to $1 or more per card. Once I did the math, it became clear quite quickly that my holiday greetings might end up being green but they definitely would not be affordable.

So I decided to make my own.

First, I used the drawing tools in Microsoft Word to fashion festive images for the inside and outside of the card. Then I created the design, which would allow me to get two folded cards per 8 1/2 X 11 sheet of paper.

Speaking of paper, I wanted it to be as green as possible, so I picked up a ream of 100% post-consumer waste paper from Staples. It’s not a heavy stock like you would expect with a greeting card, but it’s going to get the job done.

Next, I bought replacement color and black inkjet cartridges for my color printer. (Side note: Staples is still offering a $3 off coupon for every inkjet or other HP printer cartridge that you bring into the store for them to recycle. Because I had two cartridges, I got $6 in coupons, which were applied to my purchase. Also good and green: HP no longer packages its inkjet cartridges in those massive clam shell plastic containers. Instead, the cartridges are housed in a cardboard container, inside a reusable plastic security device that the cashier opened at checkout and then would use again when restocking the ink.)

Then I purchased greeting card-sized envelopes. (Sadly, they were not available in a recycled paper variety.)

Not counting the cost of ink (because I’ll be using the ink long after Christmas has come and gone), I’ll have spent about $25 for possibly 1,000 cards. I say 1,000 because a ream of paper has 500 sheets, and if I’m getting two cards per sheet, well, you get the point. Anyway, that’s about three cents per card–that’s affordable in my book.

In a perfect world I would have used soy ink to print these cards but right now, soy ink is available for commercial use only–meaning I would have had to have my cards printed professionaly, which would have added on to the price. Maybe in the near future the HPs of the world will offer a soy ink cartridge option.

So, considering that I’m printing my cards of recycled paper, I can recycle the cardboard package that the inkjet cartridges came in, the fact that HP will recycle the inkjet cartridges after I’m done with them, and Staples reuses the security package it uses to hold the inkjet cartridges in the store, does this make my Christmas cards carobn-neutral? If it does, I may have just stumbled onto a new and lucrative business venture.