American Express has just become a little more aquatic.
The credit-card company will soon offer a credit card made from plastic trash recycled from the ocean. American Express
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is working with Parley for the Oceans, a design consulting company that works on making more eco-friendly products, to create the card.
The card is currently a prototype, but it will debut as a functional card within the next 12 months, said Janey Whiteside, executive vice president and general manager of global premium products and benefits at American Express.
The new card won’t replace all American Express credit cards, but will be an option for existing and new card members, Whiteside said. “We can play a unique and important role on an issue that is highly important and relevant to our card members’ lives,” she added.
While credit cards are not thrown out as often as items like plastic straws, they are usually not recyclable because they are made from several different kinds of plastic, said Darby Hoover, a senior resource specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit based in New York that advocates for the preservation of the Earth’s resources including clean air and water.
There are an estimated 636 million credit cards in circulation from the four primary credit card networks (Visa
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Mastercard
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American Express and Discover
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), according to the personal-finance website WalletHub. But consumers can keep them for several years.
Hoover said credit cards recycled from ocean trash is unlikely to make an impact on reducing plastic in the ocean. “The plastics in our oceans are generally broken down into small pieces and it’s very difficult to isolate those by type of plastic to recycle for manufacturing,” he said.
There are 150 metric tons of plastic already in the ocean, and 8 million more metric tons enter it each year, according to Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. As a result, plastic has been found in more than 60% of all seabirds and in 100% of sea turtle species, it found.
These efforts by American Express may help raise awareness about a massive environmental issue, Whiteside said. “I’m hopeful that when someone pulls out a card made from the more sustainable materials and pays with it, it will remind them to make more informed choices,” she said.
American Express is also phasing out all single-use plastic straws and coffee stirrers at its American Express airport lounges within the next 30 days, and it will eliminate all single-use plastic in airport lounges by the end of the year. It’s also eliminating those plastics from its company headquarters in New York.
Source : MTV
