Plastic Gift Cards – Recycling Ideas

With Christmas well and truly out of the way, and the mountains of gift cards both given and received now spent up, and taking up space in our purses and wallets; it is hard to know what to do with them.

It is practically an inbuilt reaction to refrain from throwing plastic cards away, not because we are super environmentally conscious (although we know we should be), it is because we feel wrong throwing something away that looks and feels like a bank card – it just feels really unnatural.

The solution… recycle the cards. You may find that some companies are now printing their gift cards on biodegradable materials, however the majority are still printing PVC plastic cards.

There are now lots of options for how to recycle used up cards, you can go online and search for the various options available. There is now a number of companies online offering card return recycling.

Alternatively, there is a growing trend of people customizing old gift cards and plastic cards themselves to create things like coasters, notebooks and even jewellery, however if that is a bit too time consuming and adventurous then the good old recycling strategy will ease not only your conscience but also space in your purse.

There is also the glaringly obvious way to recycle your plastic cards, which is so simple, we don’t know why we haven’t thought of it before… but.. you could also, wait for it… top it up again and give it as a gift card to somebody else, this not only clears it out of your way, but it is not using up extra resource, and its also another family birthday/present you don’t have to think about. Most stores allow you to keep topping up a card for reuse. However, bear in mind who you are giving it to, you don’t want to give your great aunt a gift card for a sexy lingerie store, as funny as that would be.

There we go then, quite a few options of how to be environmentally friendly and not just waste perfectly good plastic gift cards by throwing them in the bin.