Businesses are becoming more environmentally conscious as one can see from the recent trends such as the restaurant chains eliminating plastic straws and the hospitality industry starting to replace travel-sized tubes of toiletries with large dispensers. As a gift card manufacturer, we are also seeing the eco-trend in the retail industry as more retailers are requesting to use biodegradable paper stock for their gift cards instead of using PVC (polyvinyl chloride), the more common, cheaper option.
As gift cards is the most requested gift every year in the last decade, Americans purchase around 2 billion gift cards each year, which calculates to more than 75 million pounds of PVC material from plastic cards piling up in landfills annually. PVC is toxic to the environment and very difficult to recycle. Aside from efforts to reduce wastes by reloading used gift cards or increasing the use of electronic gift cards, many companies, such as Starbucks and Whole Foods, have begun to offer plant-based biodegradable gift cards as alternatives to PVC plastic to reduce plastic waste.
Aware of the rising demand of eco-friendly cards, Valerian has begun taking initiatives to work with our paper card suppliers to provide various paper card options made in high quality and priced reasonably. The paper card acts the same purpose like a PVC gift card with the same dimension/thickness and can include add-ons like embossing, foil stamping, and lamination; and accepts magnetic stripes, signature panels, scratch-offs, bar codes, etc. However, one thing to note is additions like magnetic strips will not be biodegradable.
Feel free to contact us at (972) 783-7600 to learn more about what eco-friendly alternative options Valerian has for gift cards. As businesses make efforts to reduce wastes due to disruption from climate change and higher consumer demand, we aim to all work together to find better ways to benefit the environment and take care of the earth we all live in.
References: Earth911, CNN Business, Credit Cards, Incentive Mag
