For those of you following along, or not familiar with what I'm talking about, here's the original image which was circulated at the beginning of December:
I shared it on facebook, which I had about 130 followers on, and usually got about 2 likes per post, and if I'm lucky, the odd share or comment.
Well.
I'm now up to around 700 followers on facebook (and counting - hello!) and nearly half a million people have seen my post. There have been about 5 thousand shares of the original post, from what I can track, but many more out there I don't know about, where the photo has been downloaded and then shared on. Unfortunately some of these kinds of shares have the wrong information attached (even though it's correct in the image), so if in doubt, please refer to the post above.
For clarity, I want to remind everyone that if you imagine a Christmas card to be like a little book, it's only the front page we want. You can remove the back page, dust it off with a damp cloth and shake any loose glitter from your cloth into the bin. As long as it's now glitter-free, you can put the 'back page' into the recycling. I like to use the side that isn't written on by the sender for shopping lists, or notes next to the phone to get more use out of them before I put them in the recycling bin.
We do not want recyclable cards. You can recycle those yourself at home, or make your own decorations from these - tutorials for four different kinds of ornaments are coming soon.
We do not want wrapping paper. The ornaments I am planning to make need to be made from card, paper is too thin, and is an increased fire risk. Please don't send wrapping paper.
We do not want gift tags, baubles or gift bags. We have no facility to store or reuse these. Please do not send them.
We do not want people to send cards from overseas. This is expensive for you and creates additional work for us, as well as the postal service. It creates additional burden on our planet's resources. Please destroy or repurpose these locally.
If you wish to recognise the work, time and resources that we (me, at Girl Industries and Rosie, the owner of Weigh Ahead, who has very kindly agreed to be a drop-off point), please consider shopping with us - we post our products all over the world. Or you could set up something similar for glitter or other non-recyclable cards in your own country - maybe there's already a scheme in place which you could join in with. Alternatively, if you like what we're doing and want to buy us a coffee (we are going to need several), you can support us at ko-fi.com/girlindustries
But ultimately, thank you for getting behind what was 'just an idea'. And please encourage everyone you know NOT to buy glitter cards and wrapping paper next year.
