a credit cards on a beach
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Don’t even try to call this clickbait, we said “literally”…

American Express has done what no other credit card brand has done, announcing that the famous, borderline iconic Amex Green Card will soon officially be – garbage. No really, it is.

The credit card giant partnered with Parley For The Oceans to create a new card made primarily out of plastic recycled from beaches, islands and coastal communities, bringing a sustainable element to the class American Express card. We’re talking strictly about the physical card, and not its features when calling it garbage, of course ;)…

a turtle swimming in the waterParley created a system where plastics are recaptured from oceans around the world, and turned into a premium alternative to new “virgin” plastic, thus reducing waste and helping to clean up the oceans. In other words, rather than make cards out of new plastic which creates more waste, Amex is creating them out of plastic that exists and removing the waste from oceans, islands and communities.

The new Amex Green Card will debut into consumers hands later this year…

To make sure this goes full circle, American Express is providing easy card recycling steps to get your old card to a proper place, for all US consumer and business cards in the year 2020. You send it back, they recycle properly, voila. The American Express x Parley partnership is estimated to remove up to 1 million lbs of marine plastic through clean ups and projects. Pretty cool.

a close-up of a credit cardThe Amex Green Card will relaunch this fall, and as of yet, it’s impossible to know whether it’s new cardmember benefits will follow a similar tangent to its physical materials. We certainly hope not! Whatever the new iteration of this classic card brings, travel fanatics may still prefer the Amex Gold with 4X points on dining, or the Platinum Card with 5x on airfare, which bring bonus points and perks for most travel activities.

If American Express can find a cool recycled material for the metal Platinum Card which sounds as good clinking it down on a bar counter as the current card, I’m all for that too. But until then, that clink is everything…

Gilbert Ott

Gilbert Ott is an ever curious traveler and one of the world's leading travel experts. His adventures take him all over the globe, often spanning over 200,000 miles a year and his travel exploits are regularly...

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6 Comments

  1. All well and good,but it would be great if this could go hand in hand with more education on how to recycle and dispose of plastic in our day to day lives. In the UK at least more than half of household plastic sent for recycling ends up incinerated or landfilled due to contamination. More education please!

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