American Express has partnered with Parley and will offer the ‘first ever’ card made from primarily reclaimed plastic. This reclaimed plastic card will be available to consumer and business green card holders and looks like it’s part of the bigger rumored green refresh. In addition American Express will begin offering a card recycling program in 2020 where can members can send in expired and non working cards to ensure they get recycled properly. The last part of this announcement is that today through September 23rd consumers can go to @AmericanExpress or @parley.tv on instagram and explain explain why they #BackOurOceans or tag friends, for each comment they will remove 2 lbs of plastic from the beaches and coasts up to 1 million lbs.
I’m not sure exactly how American Express is claiming that this is the first ever card made from reclaimed plastic, as I’ve definitely seen other companies do this before. It seems a bit unusual to make this out to be such a dramatic and useful change and then to only do it on one card, rather than the full line up. I’m also not sure how useful the recycling program is given that it would involve shipping the card back to American Express. I guess it’s good to see card issuers doing something, but reducing things like unwanted mailers might be a better direction than this sort of thing.
