If you really want to make a difference, sending personal messages on postcards to decision makers and/or neighbours and peers as part of your regular activism mix will make far more difference than abstaining from anything. Your neighbourhood, region, country and the world needs unprecedented mass action by all governments at all levels to solve the problems we are facing. Plus it needs us to stand up for those changes both before they are won and after to keep them in place. Act like your life and future depend on it, because it does.
We know of no scientific evaluation specifically on the impact of printed postcards on the environment (climate, forestry, energy, transport, etc). So a good starting place is a personal 'ecological footprint' analysis of where our biggest personal contributions come from. Note there is a 'carbon' footprint and the wider 'ecological' footprint.
An Exeter University study estimated that one greeting card (similar weight of an A5 postcard) sent by post within the UK would have a carbon footprint of 140g CO2e while one cup of white tea has a carbon footprint of 71g CO2e - so a postcard has the carbon footprint of 2 cups of tea.
Here are some of what we found online - remember each has its bias and vested interest (as does PostBug):
Note that PostBug postcards are either from recycled / post-consumer paper waste or are FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certified (or any great sustainability standard we can find). They are also 100 recyclable so that they go back into the cycle of creating new paper and cards. Plus we try and find unioned printers or a living wage is paid.
You can measure yours on one of these footprint calculators or find your own.
The biggest contributions to your footprint always include:
So even if you don't use printed postcards, you (and we) are over-consuming just sitting at home on your phones and computers eating foods from around the world wearing clothes made in Asia on fibres grown elsewhere (or made from oil).
You can see that to reduce your personal footprint, you would need to go vegan with local self-grown/traded seasonal food, not use a phone or computer, wear homemade/repaired clothes, walk everywhere and defend the countryside areas against sheep/deer/cow grazing to let forests regrow without being eaten at the sapling stage.
Just accessing and reading this page on your phone or computer likely had as large a footprint as a printed postcard. Watching just onr Netflix show is much much higher.
We are not suggesting nothing can be done: it can. But avoiding sending printed postcard it not going to make a difference. So what is?
From a wider perspective, the only change that will make a difference now is government legislated change everywhere. This can have a fast and wide ranging impact. We've tried 'personal' change for decades and not enough of us are doing it. This is why Extinction Rebellion is not focused on light bulbs and recycling but on government action (through public pressure). Change our personal habits is necessary but insufficient. Everyone needs to change yesterday.
One way we can get governments to change is to campaign smarter and more effectively, and postcards (like emails, phone calls, visits, etc.) are one part of that action ecosystem.
Relying on consumers and corporations to make voluntary changes that have a meaningful, rapid impact has rarely worked. It often gets many small, short term and symbolic wins, but nothing systematic, sustained and universal. This doesn't mean we should stop doing it, just that it is insufficient for the scale of change needed. Doing it simply prepares us for the larger changes that are needed.
Furthermore, corporate and consumer change is often manipulated by vested interests for the status quo. For example Plastic recycling was championed by the plastics industry leading to very little actual recycling but a lit more plastic. Smoking was promoted to women as an act of their 'liberation' and bottled water is promoted as safe to sell free/cheap local water at higher prices.
While all governments have their waste and corruption, they are the single institution that has country-wide authority to make rules that apply to all and to enforce it. Event UN and EU bodies are simply a collection of national governments and all the dirty politics that go with that. So while change has to happen globally, the real power is only there to make it happen nationally, regionally and city wide.
What we can do to minimise the impact of printed postcards is:
At this stage of the global polycrisis, getting government action will have a massive impact. Whereas not using postcards will make no difference. But using cards as part of a mix can help get government action....but of course can't guarantee it.
The scientific evidence and moral imperative shows that the 'negative environmental impact of printed postcards' argument is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic as it sinks.
What we need is better regulation, safety standards, hard decisions, leadership, and allyship to save as many as possible (Titanic and Earth) and printed postcards can help make that point in a small way (like everything else in its small way)
What are your thoughts on this important topic?
We're guessing you're like us: you wish to do all you can to minimise your impact. That is why we started PostBug: to put people-powered campaigning and advocacy for a better future into anybody hands who shares those values.
We (the PostBug founding team) are pioneers of campaigning since the early 2000s and have seen email and social media rise in their usage while in-person, local groups, phone calls and printed letters and postcards havel fallen in use. However getting people's attention is not always about volume: it is also about visibility and memorability. Thus if everyone is using email, postcards stand out: less is more.
One of the founding team is also a sustainability expert (MSc) with more than 35 years experience and PostBug is continuation of finding ways to advance sustainability within an unsustainable system.
So PostBug is a tool for making change by getting noticed. We want recipients to to take notice and be reminded by seeing great looking postcards up on their walls and desks. We want them re-reading and sharing messages on the postcards with peers to remind them of the campaign. In the end, we want bold action by governments (and companies) - and that calls for citizen power everywhere.
