Cut your Christmas card-bon dioxide emissions!

IF you send just one physical Christmas card this year, you’ll produce the ‘carbon dioxide equivalent’ (CO2e *) of about 140g, according to research by Exeter University.

In the UK alone, we send between an estimated 150million and 900million festive cards (the lower figure has been repeatedly attributed to Royal Mail, the higher one appears to come from the Greetings Card Association).

That means we release between 21,000 and 126,000 metric tonnes of CO2e into the atmosphere, when you take into account the manufacture, printing and posting of our Christmas cards – and the decomposition of the estimated one-third of them which end up in landfill.

That’s the same amount of CO2 as the annual emissions from between 12,300 and 74,000 cars!

So here at Climate Post, we thought it would be nice to offer you a more eco-friendly alternative this year: FREE e-CARDS!

We’ve created our own range of e-cards for you to send via email, drastically reducing that festive climate harm.

You should know that e-cards aren’t carbon-free, due to the electricity used by computers – but they’re far more environmentally-friendly.

So below is an assortment of animated and static-image Christmas e-cards for you to send by email.

Just click on the Download link for your chosen e-card, then insert it into the body of an email as an image and write your festive greeting.

Happy Christmas everyone!

* ‘Carbon dioxide equivalent’ is the term used to compare the harmful warming potential of all greenhouse gases, by expressing it in terms of the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide. It’s useful because it provides a simple universal comparison.