Magic The Gathering cards are not recyclable, despite their recent digitization. The inked paper from Magic cards should be recoverable, but the blending of paper, gloss or exterior coating, and core fiber makes it more difficult. Magic cards can be recycled, and the paper will likely be reused and repurposed. A staff member, Roni Ruggenberg, stated that the cards themselves are recyclable, but boosters are not. However, there are improvements in the process aimed at making Magic cards 100 recyclable and sustainable.
Most Magic: The Gathering cards are not suitable for recycling, even if they are made of cardboard. The paper fiber has a mixture of plastic cores and coatings, making their material composition cardboard, ink, and glue. Magic: The Gathering players will soon have a new place to dispose of cracked booster packs thanks to a recycling initiative pilot test. Magic Cards are likely recyclable with any mixed paper/cardboard products, so toss them in with the magazines or printed materials.
In summary, Magic: The Gathering cards are not recyclable due to the ink used on them, and players should consider recycling their booster packs or other mixed paper/cardboard products.
📹 Are Magic the Gathering Cards Recyclable?
Magicthegathering #recylingideas #recycling References: https://finecardstock.com/topic/cardstock-weight-guide/ …
📹 Sustainable MTG Packaging & Something New in Secret Lair! Are Magic: the Gathering Cards Recyclable?
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The worst offender I’ve seen is the Secret Lair: Ultimate Edition product. There are a small handful of cards (15 or so) packed inside of crystal plastic, inside of a giant case the size of a small briefcase, enclosed in a giant cardboard box. If shipped, that box is often packed inside of another box. I don’t want to ever see anything like this ever again.
Hello, very nice episode. I have two questions: Do you plan to change the Bundle packaging? Because the black box tray under the bundle box, is completly useless, because nothing teally fits there. The other question is about the booster packaging. I live in germany and in my prerelease pack the promo and the tokens were in a completly recycable booster package. Is there a plan to use this for all boosters? I know you mostly cant say anything about your future plans, but would be niceto know this. thank you.
Loved the article! I was happily surprised to see a paper wrap for my promo card in my Crimson Vow pre-release kit instead of the transparent plastic wrap. It would be great that they could make it so the black box included in bundles could be turned into something like punch-out deckboxes, dividers, counters and more.
The only issue with minimal packaging was that they look so much alike that Amazon sent me the wrong deck three times (two replacement attempts resulted in getting the same wrong deck. I saw that mentioned widely on Reddit. Maybe some bigger graphical distinction even on smaller form. Great discussion on this article!
I never thought I’d watch a 20 minute long article on packaging with bated breath. Anything can be interesting if looked at in enough detail, especially if narrated by a passionate person. It’s good that there’s pressure from within Wizards to try to move away from plastic, hope you figure out those paper booster designs.
For people who want to recycle your packs – Terracycle offers a way to recycle plastic-foil composites like magic packs! If you collect your packs and take the wrappers to your local REI many branches have a Terracycle box for granola bar wrapper recycling (the same kind as magic packs) so you can drop them off there!
Super cool episode and a fantastic guest, well done Roni! What I’d like to see, based on already ongoing things or just completely new ideas (note that I’m in Europe, some things are different here): – Commander packaging could be even smaller, the minimal packaging could be the default. To make it more appealing on the shelves when necessary, a sort of mini display stand could be made where the store can put the minimal packaging version onto/into. I think the vast majority of commander products for Europe could be in the minimal packaging. We don’t have Magic products for sale in generic stores like Walmart, the whole Walmart vs. LGS discussion is non-existant in Europe. Many of us don’t have an LGS either. I live in a major metropolitan area with a population of about one million people where the main city has a population of about 650k and there is no LGS. I do all my shopping online and never ever need the fancy packaging. The last time I bought a Magic product locally was a booster pack 25 years ago in a generic toy store. And I don’t buy Magic product on Amazon since they’re usually not competetive when it comes to price. The specialised Magic/TCG stores or game stores with an additional online business need access to the minimal packaging version. – Eliminate individual draft boosters and re-invent tournament packs by putting the contents of three or six draft boosters in a single package – Get rid of individual boosters entirely for all non-draftable products. Set boosters and collector boosters don’t need to be individual boosters in most cases (pun intended!
I’m back to say that I like what has been done for Kamigawa Neo with the bundle. The pull tab with security seals, paper wrappers for the land/promo packs, removal of the black box in the bottom, and addition of the cardboard with punch out separators. The next step I hope to see if paper boosters like Flesh and Blood TCG came up with. This way most sealed MTG products could be paperless.
Great interview, love to see some of the behind the scenes! However, a bit of constuctive critisism from me. I feel with the commander packaging, (putting aside the ecommerce packaging) that it’s waaay too large and overly packaged to the extreme. Sure it looks fine on a shelf, but all the elements add up to so much wasted materials, even if they are recyclable. So going back to the ecommerce packaging, I really think that really hits a much better size for the hundred cards + tokens etc. Why does it need to be inside the oversized cardboard sarcophagus? Wouldn’t it just save so much on materials and subsequently costs, to just put a nice,eye catching sleeve around the outside (much like the Pioneer pre-cons) for shops? You could probablly fit an extra 5 decks in the space of 1 of those monoliths. Sorry to ramble, just something I was quite interested about even before this article, especially now with at least 2 commander decks coming out each set. Really great you are going plastic free though, it’s the big companies that can make the big differences and it looks like you guys are headed in the right direction.
In general, I do find MTG products packaging can do more without needing to go to the recycling bin to start with. For example, prerelease kit boxes can be very simply turned into a EDH box with room for dice and beads. A article of that – m.youtube.com/watch?v=WIOi-tCRyR4. The prerelease box can straight up be a EDH box with some modifications from WoTC. Next, there is the black platform box under each Bundle box. It is basically a waste after the first one. The dimensions are weird to repurpose for MTG accessories. The plastic reduced EDH precon repackaging was very good. Can you add more punch out counters? Some new punch outs like one to represent 5x, 10x +1/+1 counters would be welcomed. The Modern Master paper packaging also had a problem where you can reseal it after opening carefully. The intent was right though; new alternative to plastic wrappers cannot come fast enough.
Thanks for all your hard work Roni! When I saw all the plastic gutted from the commanderdecks this past year I was so happy to see the effort put into having less a negative impact on the environment. Also super smart on all the changes on secret lair. I have saved all my booster wrappers for the past …4 years I wanna say and plan to make a collage of all the packarts to hang on the wall but with how many I have its porbably gonna cover the whole wall. I hope you guys keep looking how to phase out plastic wrappers on boosters and make it work for everyone cause I know how much instant trash that is. Plenty of comapnys say they will look into being greener while never delevering but I’m glad to see you guys makng the strides to be better and I very much respect all the hard work you guys put into it.
I’d be interested in learning more about how the modern masters 2015 paper packaging wasn’t a cause of quality issues. In Australia where I live, if you pull a foil out of a pack and don’t get it sleeved pretty quickly, it’ll curl from the humidity. Basically all the foils I saw from that set were curled. I don’t see how the prolonged exposure to the humidity due to non-air tight packaging isn’t a cause here.
I am pretty disappointed with the new Secret Lair packaging. The old boxes made great deck boxes. Myself, and many others used them to hold our commander decks. This new packaging goes right in the recycling bin, no second life 😥 I am really curious to see the packaging for Secret Lair Heads I Win, Tails You Loose.
The main problem I have with the Amazon minimal packaging boxes is the sellers are all terrible and it’s only a 25% chance you’ll actually get the product you ordered. I ordered the GW Coven deck from Midnight Hunt, and was repeatedly sent the UB Zombies deck instead. In order to actually get the cards I wanted, I ended up ‘returning’ the product after the third time, and went to my FLGS for the full version like I should’ve in the first place. I don’t know if there’s anything y’all can do about Amazon’s sellers’ practices from your end, though.
I used the old big Drop boxes to hold decks… you can finagle 4 60 card decks with sleeves into one of these (all single sleeved!), or 1 double sleeved Commander deck and a double sleeved 60 card deck with sideboard and still have room for plenty of tokens, or you could just put 2 Commander decks in, though not double sleeved for both. Convenient size! Not sure if I can think of much to do with the new size, but maybe I’ll think of something? I did find the old box’s little tab was not very durable to repeated use, and required care in opening/closing to keep them from failing, but they are a decent holder if you’ve already bought the Drops, they can be packed nice and tight to help reduce curling over time (I find it helps, ymmv). So, while those big boxes were a nightmare in many ways, they can be handy to hold cards. Nice to hear that efforts are being made.
Wow, yeah the commander packaging has been super wasteful, you print a copy of the commander directly on the box that just gets thrown away! Go back to how the precons used to be. Like from Invasion block, just the storage box with cards inside. That’s it! That’s all it needs. No punch out tokens or four layers of cardboard to toss. Just a small deck box. It just won’t be as pretty on a shelf but we’re trying to be green here! Green doesn’t mean pretty.
A change I loved in Belgian Prerelease Kits was the change from a plastic wrapper for the Prerelease promo to a paper one. That way, people don’t keep their promo in the wrapper for reselling (because they can’t see which one it is) and play with it. It’s an awesome bonus that it is better for the environment! I would like more packs to be like that. I dislike aluminium packs. They always remind me that Magic cards are mass-produced, which makes them feel less special.
If the MM2 packaging was not the reason for card damage, why not communicate? Why not educate? Tell us why and trust that we are smart enough to get it if you go back to it. Indeed, this was a great time to actually explain what was actually the problem and yet, again, Wizards chooses opacity and unnecessary secrecy.
Hey Gavin wondering since Dominaria it seems a product is sprayed on the cards because since then they have kind of a bad chemical smell. I figured that this spray is used to remove humidity and reduce the curling. But, is that chemical product used eco-friendly? I also encountered products that are made in Japan and the cards are more glossy and slide between them. They seems also more firm. Like a wax film was applied on the cards. Is that wax eco-friendly?
I use all the card board packaging for my bomb fires we have. Same with the wrap the individual packs come in makes great kindling. I like to display sealed commander decks in my gameroom I don’t like the e-commerce packaging for that reason. I have one of each commander deck made displayed. I always buy one to display one to open and many to hold to resell in 2042.
Glad to have found this! Would love to see paper based wrappers like other companies have started using! However, having toured recycling sorting centers, wrappers even made of paper are too small to really recycle well- as are magic cards themselves- they won’t make it through sorting. There’s gotta be a better way to make them compostable!
Sadly the paper packs aren’t “Tamperproof” Which as a security guard and former retail shelf stocker, I can assert is something that really needs to be one of the top priorities for your packaging. Sustainability is great and all, but if people can easily steal the product and run out with it, it means stores won’t want to carry your products to be sold as is. Some feedback I’d give right away is that the pull tabs on the new commander decks was a bad idea, for the above stated reason. You actually want the products to be a bit difficult to open. If a crook can easilly pop open the bottom slip out the inner deck box and shove it into a pocket and walk out of the store, that’s a loss the store incurred because of a direct result of your packaging design. Its a HUGE bummer and I hate to have to have typed this out. I wish we could have convenient easy package to pop open and then dispose of. But sadly there are dishonest people in the world and you have to account for that. I would also suggest taking a look at different kinds of plastics. I don’t think it’s fair to write plastic off entirely. The thing we’re going to have to do moving into the future is assess which plastics are the better of the bunch. As a magic player who’s also a Lego enthusiast, I know Lego is doing a lot of work into sustainable plastics for their products. So a lot of cutting edge research is being done. I’d want to look at what could be possible to switch the elements that do need to be plastic over to something that can be recycled, or perhaps something that is at least sustainably sourced like bioplastics.
I was just thinking about this not long ago after opening my first booster box and seeing the pile of wrappers. I’m not going to lie, I felt a little guilty about creating that much waste so making recyclable packs would definitely be awesome! My main concern would people tampering with the packs and then putting them back though, so that’s something to keep in mind
Ronie thank you so much for trying to make wizards being green. I am so happy that you are trying to reduce the waste. Keep up the great work. Recently I bought a bundle and the lands were wrapped in a heavy paper that almost felt like it was like parchment paper used in cooking. Is that paper package recyclable?
Would love to see the MM15 packaging return. It was so satisfying to open and in my opinion it was a better looking packaging as well. Just make sure they are not re-sealable and then everything is great! I really belive if that packaging was used on a less high value/profile set like a regular standard set it would have gone over a lot better because there wouldn’t have been such a market for resealing
I appreciate how much you and MaRo share about your work. But WotC is a big company, and there is so much going on. I appreciate getting the chance to see someone else talk about the good work that they do. And it’s refreshing to hear that she got into the field and at a large company precisely to limit waste.
I mean… “Paper packaging back in 2015 did not hurt the cards” And “I see replacing the plastic wrapper as blue sky (hard to do) because it does such a good job protecting the cards.” These two sentences don’t really work with eachother, do they? Other than that, I really enjoyed the article, thanks Gavin.
Please don’t make cards that say, You can’t lose the game and your opponents can’t win the game. Book of Exalted Deeds: If you don’t have or have already used a Field of Ruin then you lose the game.. It’s extremely toxic. Put it on a Faceless Haven and it’s game over for 3 and then 3 more. Please stop.
This was great and illuminating. Love to hear how resourceful you folk have been behind the scenes. I’m not a fervent member of green peace but I do get concerned with ow much I throw away or how much waste I contribute with all the products I order and purchase. Even the punch-out tokens in commander decks are a strong idea to repurpose what would otherwise be trashed. Love the direction you guys are going! Thanks!