Before you use your credit card
The most powerful votes we cast are the little choices we make every day. We put a lot of time and effort into debating and formulating world-wide environmental issues and solutions. But on Earth Day it seems appropriate for us to stand back from the forest and take a look at the trees.
Think about the color of money
Take, for example, the choice to use cash or a debit or credit card for your next monetary transaction. When you pay for lunch today or stop at the store on your way home from work, will you use a plastic card or bills made of cotton and linen? Or will you make a blended transaction by paying with cash obtained from a cash advance on your credit card? These are choices we make every day – and like all our day-to-day choices, they add up to powerful votes about our environment. So in honor of Earth Day, let’s consider which vote is the greenest one.
Start with the raw materials
Plastic
Credit cards are made of polyvinyl chloride, a petroleum product that is rarely recycled, lasts just about forever in a landfill, and produces dioxins when incinerated. According to slate.com it takes about 4.25 grams of petroleum to manufacture one 5-gram credit card. Multiply that by 1.6 billion—the number of credit, debit, and ATM cards produced in America in 2007. The lifespan of a credit or debit card is just two to four years. Add to this the billions of gift cards and store charge cards we manufacture every year. Now throw in the fact that most gift cards are used only once.
Paper
At first glance, paper currency seems to have advantages. Paper currency is made of a blend of low-quality cotton and linen waste fibers. Cotton and linen are renewable resources. But the picture is not all rosy, much less green. Cotton and linen production requires an enormous amount of farm land. Conventional cotton cultivation – a particularly noxious bane to the environment — requires extremely large quantities of water, pesticides and fertilizers. According to figures compiled in 2007 by the Danish Environmental Protection Agency the cultivating, harvesting, and ginning of cotton are nearly as energy-intensive as the manufacturing of PVC.
Add to this the fairly short life spans of paper currencies and the fact that paying with paper also requires the production of coins. Extracting metals is environmentally devastating and energy intensive. According to figures published by the United States Mint, some 41,000 tons of metal were used to make America’s change in 2008. Some of the metal, of course, is recycled, but the production of coins from recycled metal uses energy and resources, too.
Consider the unknown and hidden costs
Raw materials and production are only the beginning of the analysis. There are also the costs of transportation and storage of paper money and the electricity required for debit and credit card transactions. And when you begin to ponder the unknowns — like what sort of effects electronic payments have on data centers and third-party processors — an informed choice doesn’t seem possible.
Use the green stuff
The relative greenness of cash and credit may be beyond our ability to analyze, but we don’t have to throw in the towel. The simple and environmentally sound choice is to stop unnecessary spending. However we choose to pay, buying more things we don’t need will always be the worst choice for the environment. Using a credit card encourages us to make impulsive and unnecessary purchases with money we don’t have. With the green stuff, on the other hand, what you see is what you have and you can’t spend more than that.
Interesting post, very interesting. Oddly enough, a fair amount of currency is actually worth more by weight for the materials than the relative worth of the currency that is printed on it. Prime example – pennies. The U.S. penny is worth more than one cent by weight of it’s materials. The only problem is that the government made it a crime to melt it down and trade in the copper for cash, a felony, in fact. It’s just wasteful.