The Changes

Here was the environmental footprint of the Christmas card in 2005, according to the UK government:

One billion Christmas cards, weighing 20,000 tonnes and equivalent in volume to at least 20 Olympic sized swimming pools, will end up as waste this Christmas.

That's only the tip of the (rapidly melting) iceberg. Consider the energy involved in transporting those cards to a billion addresses – energy expended all the more inefficiently because postal services have to ramp up each year for a huge surge in mail, and then ramp back down again.