How Many Trees Die For Luck?

As we say goodbye to the year of the tiger and welcome the year of the rabbit, I got to wondering – How many trees are chopped down for this age-old tradition? Think about it. Every year the Chinese exchange dozens of notes amongst family, friends, co-workers, employees and helpers as ‘lucky money’. According to tradition, each note, given in a lucky red envelope, has to be newly printed, acquired from the bank fresh, crisp and flat. So, with an estimated 1.3 billion people living in China, and an extra 7.5 million in the Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macau, that’s A LOT of money printed every year to prepare for Chinese New Year. And that’s not including the red envelopes that cover every news stall like a blanket or the paper lanterns and decorations that take over whole stores, most of which need to be changed every year because they refer to the new period’s zodiac animal.

But what can be done? You can’t really stomp on thousands of years of tradition and submit 20% of the world’s population to bad luck, just for the sake of a few trees, a few inches of ozone layer and a melted ice cap, can you? It would be like trying to get the Western world to stop using toilet paper or decorating Christmas trees. But you can do something …