The Christmas cards I’ve received at work this year have ranged from very good to downright terrible. The worst, by far, was from a peripheral manufacturer that did no more than slap its logo on the front of a piece of creased cardboard, sketch on a few snowflakes and write underneath that they were celebrating 10 years in Europe. I won’t name them for obvious reasons, although they did more or less redeem themselves by slipping a jumbo Toblerone into the jiffy bag in which it was dispatched.

The lawyers sent me just a three-line email explaining that their card budget had gone to charity. That’s fine. I’d rather the money went to a worthy cause than being spent on unrecyclable waxy paper that will be forgotten 10 minutes after it’s opened.

The most ethical card of all, though, was from Bite, the company that handles Apple’s UK PR account. For starters, the address was printed on the envelope itself. No extra waste in the form of stickers and labels, and no nasty plastic windows to stop it being recycled.

Once inside, you find a plain, unprinted Christmas tree shape, cut very precisely so that it would tessellate with another of the same shape when rotated through 180 degrees, so again there would be no waste. Inside, a simple message written in blue biro and a short, four-digit code. By typing this into their dedicated site, they could track that you’d received the card and, in return, would plant in your name one of 1200 trees they had bought. You could then track the progress of your tree online.

Why 1200 trees? Well, it’s one each for the 1000 journalists to whom they sent cards, plus an extra 200 to offset the carbon generated in producing and sending them out.

Now that really is a green Christmas.

If you want to offset the carbon cost of your own Christmas cards, check out Plant a Tree Today. It’s surprisingly inexpensive. You can offset a year’s driving in a small car like mine for just £8, and a year of day to day life for a little more than £2 a month.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 20th, 2006 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.