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Thursday 5 December 2019

ENGLAND: School Principal Bans Christmas Cards Citing Environmental Concerns

A school principal in England has banned the exchange of Christmas cards on campus, arguing that it harms the planet.
According to Fox News, principal Jonathan Mason of Belton Lane Primary School in Lincolnshire wrote a letter to parents highlighting “the impact of sending Christmas cards on the environment.”
“I have been approached by a number of children recently who are concerned about the impact of sending Christmas cards on the environment,” Mason’s letter begins.  “Throughout the world, we send enough Christmas cards that if we placed them alongside each other, they’d cover the world’s circumference 500 times The manufacture of Christmas cards is contributing to our ever-growing carbon emissions.”
Mason then says that school will henceforth no longer have a post box for Christmas cards and urged parents to instead just send one card to the whole class that teachers can display.
“In order to be environmentally friendly in school we will not be having a post box for Christmas cards from this year onwards,” he continues. “Instead, we can encourage you to save money and the environment by not sending cards to all of the children in a class individually but instead, if you send a card please send one card to the whole class. Teachers can then display the card in the classroom for everyone to see.”
A school principal in England banned students from sending Christmas cards due to environmental concerns:
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Parents did not exactly welcome Mason’s new edict with open arms and have since been branding him as a Grinch.
“Why should children have the joy of taken out of Christmas? Why can’t all these cards be recycled anyway? And I buy a lot of Christmas cards for charity,” one parent told the Daily Mail, “It’s great to see them come out of school with their cards and a smile on their faces. It’s a Christmas tradition they have had for a long time and now they are taking it away. I know we have to protect the environment, but these are a few Christmas cards once a year and to be told about this on a piece of paper seems contradictory.”
Another mother accused Mason of “rank hypocrisy” because Christmas cards are largely recyclable. Some have even be reused year after year as a form of decoration.
“Telling people to stop sending cards in a letter sent out to hundreds of kids stinks of rank hypocrisy,” the mother said. “They are mostly recyclable anyway. I agree that environmental issues are important but I don’t see recyclable Christmas cards as a massive contributor to these problems.”
Mason issued no response when questioned by reporters.
The idea of Christmas cards being a bane on planet Earth have circulated in environmentalist circles for some years. In 2012, an article in Mashable argued for a move to e-cards, citing the fossil fuels burned in the delivery of Christmas cards year after year.

“In 2011 the U.S. Postal Service mail carriers and truck drivers drove 1.25 billion miles and put 125,000 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to sources cited in the infographic,” the article argued. “While the amount of postal mail sent appears to be slowly decreasing over the past few years, in 2011 people still went through lots of paper — approximately 168 billion pieces of mail were sent in the U.S. last year. According to the USPS, between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve last year 16.5 billion cards, letters and packages were delivered. While sometimes sending things via paper mail is unavoidable, making a move to digital ecards cuts down on paper waste and the need for stamps.”

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