It’s no secret that we care about the environmental impact our company has on the planet. We already use only sustainably-sourced materials for our greeting cards, our gift-wrap is made of 100% recycled paper and we plant a tree via Tree Aid for every 4 Papergang boxes that we sell - in the last year alone we’ve already planted over 10,000 trees! On top of this we ensure that the majority of our products are manufactured in the UK, so that we can reduce our carbon footprint. But we still felt there was more we could do and knew that our biggest impact could be with our greeting card packaging.
Over the last few years, documentaries by Sir David Attenborough like Blue Planet II and Our Planet have really highlighted the impact the throwaway plastic is having on our planet. We want to make sure that we’re not contributing to that and think its important that we do our bit along with everyone else.
We’ve therefore pledged to remove the plastic cellophane sleeve from all our greeting cards by the end of 2019. Millions of greeting cards are sold across the world every year (the average person in the UK sends 33 cards a year!) and most of them are individually wrapped due to pressures from retailers not wanting to lose the envelope from the greeting card. By working with our greeting card supplier we now have a solution that involves a small sticker that keeps the envelope and card together. This will be phased in at Ohh Deer with immediate effect and some of our stockists, including Sainsbury’s, have already introduced our cards without the plastic sleeve.
One of our cards showing the sticker that will be replacing cellophane packaging.
While we’re still a reasonably small greeting card publisher, we hope that many others will be joining us to ditch the plastic and do our part in helping the environment.
We are also making sure that we no longer use plastic glitter details on our cards, instead we are swapping to environmentally friendly paper glitter instead. We will also be removing plastic mailer bags over the next year and our retail stores already only offer paper carrier bags.
We can’t wait to take you along with us on this exciting and important journey!
If you want to find out more about this, PG Buzz has released an awesome article about us which you can read here!
Disclaimer: All new stock will be produced plastic bag free with old stock being used first.