Super Eco

Photo credit: San Francisco Public Library

The modern world has become a house of cards: debit cards, credit cards, driver's licenses, membership cards ... That's a lot of plastic—and as we know all too well, petroleum-based PVC cards are not biodegradable. Most ID and credit cards expire within three to five years, then get cut up and sent straight to our landfills.

The San Francisco Public Library is trimming down the trash with a pilot program for biodegradable library cards. The new eco-cards are made from sustainable, renewable, compostable corn—wow, what a win! To avoid adding a huge influx of old, plastic library cards to the city's landfills, the new eco-cards are being offered only to new library card holders or as replacements for lost cards. Eco-card users help evaluate the cards' durability and usability in an ongoing survey.

Much ado over a tiny problem? Today's plastic-packed wallets are lining landfills with discarded cards. The United States Census Bureau says there are nearly 1.5 billion credit cards in use in the country today. A stack of all those credit cards, according to a recent article in The New York Times, would reach more than 70 miles into space and be almost as tall as 13 Mount Everests. It gets worse: if that number of credit cards were thrown away every three years, the stack of credit cards would reach almost 43 Everests high after a decade—and remember, that's only counting credit cards.

Other companies are making a run at solving this problem, too. Discover Financial Services launched a biodegradable credit card in December that holds up through normal wear and tear, safe and sound inside your dark wallet. When exposed to microorganisms in compost, the ocean or landfills, the biodegradable cards break down within nine months to five years into carbon dioxide, water and a mild salt. The card's creator, BIOPVC Inc., says that no toxic vinyl chloride is left over. Other companies such as Borders Books, REI, Target, and Wal-Mart are also using bio-plastic gift cards.