Last week Melissa Chungfat wrote an excellent post on how to give the gift of carbon neutrality. I love the idea, but, there are some people on my gift giving list to whom I’d really like to give something. And while I know that virtual gifts are not carbon neutral because online activity burns a lot of electricity, I’ve come up with five actual gifts that reduce my footprint to a minimum.
1. The most neutral gift I could find is an iTunes gift certificate. Its the perfect virtual gift: no box, no plastic gift card, no shipping and its good for any iTunes download. Music, movies, TV shows and apps. One catch is that email gift certificates can only be bought in iTunes (which is free to download). Once on the store homepage look for the “buy iTunes Gifts” link. Another catch is that the recipient needs to be an iTunes user.
2. Virtual gift certificates for audio book downloads from audible.com and Ebooks.com follow the same concept as iTunes. Alternatively, Simplyaudiobooks.com has a netflicks-like download program that you can gift for 1 to 12 months. These too are online purchases redeemable for downloads.
3. The next most virtual gift I could find is Fandango email gift bucks redeemable for “any movie, any time, at any Fandango partner theater.” As the sender, you get to choose a theme “card,” write a personalized message and send a gift in dollar amounts from $10 to $100. The recipient can pre-buy movie tickets online that they then pick up at the theater. Almost as neutral as an iTunes gift. No box, no plastic gift card, no shipping, but your friend or colleague still ends up with printed ticket stubs at the theater.
4. Of course, the gift of cash is rarely unwanted. Through the Western Union website you can use a credit card to send a free holiday eCard and cash directly to a bank account. Talk about the most virtual of gifts.
5. And although its not exactly a virtual gift, more like an offset, if you want to give books this holiday season you can offset them by planting a tree for every book you buy. Along with every book you give, buy an Eco-Libris sticker, which is made from recycled paper, and put it on the book cover before you gift it. You can buy as few as 5 stickers at a time and while you’re on the site check out the Green Collar Holiday Gift Guide for Book Lovers in three separate entries (which I know about because I contributed a recommendation…)
Image: Marija Jure.
About Jennifer Kaplan
I’m a big fan of giving donations in peoples’ names too – sometimes just the donation, sometimes with a little gift.
I did Oceana this year, to adopt sea creatures in their names.
Mom gets a sea turtle, Steph gets a dolphin, and Kit gets a hammerhead shark (because he’s gotta be different)
If you DO want a physical gift, they send a cookie cutter or stuffed animal with a cute little adoption certificate.
Mom just gets the donation, but my little sister will make a pile of dolphin cookies, so she got the cookie cutter.
Thanks Jenifer for these great ideas and for having us on your list.
I would like to add that Eco-Libris is also offering now the option of adding a beautiful holiday card made of recycled paper to our trees/stickers. So if you’re interested in an affordable and unique green gift – planting trees to balance out the books your loved ones read, check out our holidays page: http://www.ecolibris.net/Holidays.asp
Happy green holidays!
Raz Godelnik
Eco-Libris
If you want to be really green this Christmas get gift cards from sites like http://www.giftzip.com or at least recycle the plastic ones at Earthworks. Those things put 75 million pounds of toxic, carcinogenic, polyvinyl chlorine into the waste stream every year and their manufacture is equally nasty and occurs in unregulated third world countries. It is just a digital code people! Ditch the plastic!
Thanks, dealdawg. Giftzip.com is a great idea. I agree that gift cards are awful waste of plastic. Gifts that ARE digital codes are a great way to go.
Instead of using paper for greeting cards that consume valuable resources, why not send a message to loved ones expressing holiday wishes in your own words. I would like to suggest a new online-mobile technology that allows you to record a personal greeting and send it to loved ones including pictures, links and text to love ones, friends and people who you might forget about around the world. It could take place of a traditional Christmas greeting card. Voike is a social networking site that really gives uses their own private PHONE COMPANY housed in a Social Site like Facebook, only much better. The service is new and so is offered completely for free. Don’t panic – get on voike.com and make this the most memorable season of giving ever by sending a heartfelt greeting in your own words.