‘Green’ gift cards in demand

Increasingly, card manufacturers and retailers are listening, offering more alternatives to plastic cards.

High-end grocery store chain Whole Foods Market Inc. did away with plastic cards in 2011 and replaced them with paper gift cards.

“Generally, at Whole Foods, we like to think green … but we were producing tons and tons of waste from PVC cards, and that wasn’t in line with what we want to do,” said Marushka Bland, gift cards project manager for the Austin, Texas, company.

Last year, Whole Foods launched a gift card during the holiday season made with wood from sustainably managed forests in Europe.

The cards, produced by Sustainable Cards in Colorado, are made with 30 percent less energy than plastic cards and are compostable.

Whole Food’s commitment to reducing its environmental affect played a role in the decision to get rid of plastic cards, Bland said, but the change was also an effort to give their customers what they want.

“If one of our customers is environmentally conscious and doesn’t want to give a plastic card, then we love to give our customer the opportunity to make a purchase they can feel good about,” Bland said.

And retailers have excellent reasons to make their customers feel good about gift cards.

Shoppers will buy nearly $30 billion in gift cards this holiday season, spending an average of about $163 on the items, a 4 percent increase from last year, according to an annual survey sponsored by the National Retail Federation.

Retailers get value out of marketing themselves as “environmentally friendly” through recycling and other programs, said Bob Engle, vice president of biopolymers at Metabolix, a Massachusetts company that produces a bioplastic alternative to the plastic typically used in cards.

But alternative cards have shortcomings.

In 2007, Target began using cards made out of a biodegradable material produced by Metabolix but terminated the deal because of the high price of production.

Although a pound of polyvinyl chloride costs a little over $1, Metabolix’s alternative costs almost $2. And one wooden card made by Sustainable Cards costs 10 cents to 15 cents, compared with 7 cents to 12 cents for plastic card orders of 100,000.

Polyvinyl chloride is also readily available around the world, easy to produce, durable and easily recyclable, said Al Vrancart, an industry adviser and founder of the International Card Manufacturers Association.

“PVC is a product that’s been around a long time and served us well,” he said.

But the industry, Vrancart said, is attempting to move in a more sustainable direction, adopting eco-friendly standards that, when met, result in a “green” certification for a product.