Christmas and Birthday Card Recycling

Greetings cards have a long and storied history in the UK. The first Christmas card on record was sent to James I by a German physician in 1611. However, it wasn’t until 1843 when the first commercial Christmas cards were produced. Then it wasn’t long before birthday cards followed the same trend.

Manufacturers typically make greeting cards from card stock directly, often from recycled materials themselves. Many cards have a glossy acrylic finish, often combined with a photograph. Soy inks are easier to clean and are becoming more common, but oil-based inks can persist.

Manufacturers print cards with specific ‘plates’ that they create using lasers to ensure a final uniform design. They print the designs thousands of times over in their special high-end printers. They then leave the final cards to dry for days once they’ve successfully applied the design and any accompanying images.

The best method for the disposal of Christmas and birthday cards is to recycle them. You can recycle most greetings cards as paper alongside their envelopes. Generally, recyclable birthday and Christmas cards should have a clear recycling symbol that indicates you can recycle it immediately.

However, you cannot recycle cards with glitter or glue – you must dispose of these with your general waste. We recommend you try to remove the glitter or glue to the best of your ability – if you can, then this allows you to recycle the card.

After you recycle your paper and card, they’re sorted into different grades. These are then reprocessed into new cards – provided they’re still of decent quality. Recycled cards are mixed with soap and water to remove the inks printed upon them, which creates slurry that becomes the base for new card products. The water can more easily remove soy ink compared to traditional oil-based ink.

Yes, you can recycle Christmas cards and birthday cards, as they’re mostly made of paper that’s easy to recycle. They’re one of the most recyclable items around the festive season. The only time you can’t recycle Christmas and birthday cards is if they have glitter, foil, and glue on them – unless you can separate the materials.

Recycling of Christmas cards especially needs encouraging as more than one billion are used in the UK every year.

You can place old birthday cards and used Christmas cards in your recycling bin at home. Businesses can make recycling cards even easier by having a paper recycling bin in the workplace. For those that deal with high volumes of card waste, up to 1100 litre wheelie bins can store lots of greetings cards for recycling.

You can also take your old cards to a recycling centre near you run by the local council or authority. Here you can dispose of them alongside other paper waste.

Waste contamination is a big issue when it comes to recycling cards. Something as simple as a half-drunk paper coffee cup thrown in with card waste can contaminate such recycling. Workers may need to dismiss entire lorry loads of recycling if there are issues, and there’s only so much they can remove by hand with such a heavy workload.

Only buying recyclable cards that use soy-based ink makes things easier for everyone. The disposable nature of cards means they’ll often be present in our waste. However, you could keep them for the memories they might represent or turn them into decorations for next year. E-cards are also becoming a popular alternative to the conventional greeting card that saves significant amounts of paper.

A few key facts about greetings cards are that:

• The greeting card industry as a whole makes nearly £2 billion every year from our purchases.
• Christmas cards produce 280 million tonnes of carbon on an annual basis.
• Around 811 million birthday cards are sent in the UK every year.