GREAT WAYS TO
RECYCLE GREETING CARDS

Recycling is good for the earth, and recycling can be fun, too. The most fun way to recycle is to find new uses for old items like greeting cards. Below are a number of ways you can recycle your family's cards.

1. Cut the pictures from the cards and make scrapbooks. You can use purchased scrapbooks or make your own with poster board covers, a hole puncher and pretty yarns or even pretty shoe laces for ties. Use birthday pictures in one. Use Christmas pictures in others. Keep some scrapbooks for yourself and give the rest for gifts. Do small "get-well" and "thinking of you" scrapbooks to take to nursing homes and hospitals. You can even use large-size card fronts for the covers on these and then other card fronts inside. Write caring messages on the blank sides. When you have ten or more, take them to a care facility or hospital and ask that they give them to people who don't get mail or visitors. Take a friend with you so you won't be too shy and deliver at least some of them yourself. Visitors mean a whole lot to lonely people. They will remember you each time they look at the scrapbooks.

2. Re-use the cards your family receives to make new ones. For these. the inside of the front should be blank or at least have no handwriting on it. Cut it away. Write your own birthday, Christmas or other "greeting" on the back and sign it. Give to friends and family members when you know someone who needs a card.

3. Don't throw greeting card backs away! Punch a hole in one top corner of each back after you have used the front. Use a big yarn needle and pull yarn through the holes when you have a stack of the card backs. Knot the yarn far enough from the cards to make a hanger. Hang in your kitchen. Pull or cut the card backs away when you need scratch paper or your mom wants to make a shopping list.

4. If you still have extra cards, go to the telephone. Rehabilitation hospitals and nursing homes use cards for crafts. Churches often collect them and give them to charities that make new cards or other crafts from them to sell as fund-raisers. Just call the churches in your telephone books and ask if they have a card drive going on. This one is real. My church sends bales of card fronts (they may only want the fronts and only if there is nothing written on the back) to a charity every few months.

Learn more about this author, Margaret Shauers.
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