Dutch Bank to Ease Climate Guilt with Credit Card

by Mike Bevel, CollectionIndustry.com

Feeling guilty about global warming? The health of the planet? Our rapidly diminishing natural resources? Are you European? You should probably buy yourself a little something, then.

Dutch-owned Rabobank is introducing something called a ?climate credit card? that puts money charged towards environmentally friendly and helpful projects run by the World Wide Fund of Nature.

Say, for instance, you (the ?you? that has a Rabobank account; play along even if you don?t) use your Rabobank card to purchase gasoline petrol at a filling station. That purchase would result in a larger contribution to WWF than, say, a meal out. Unless that meal was endangered species in a nice ozone sauce with a side salad made up entirely of rainforest. The more your purchases hurt the planet, the more money gets donated.

“We wanted to come up with a way to balance consumer behaviours to a compensation mechanism,” said Johan van de Gronden, head of the WWF in the Netherlands.

It?s a win-win situation. Kinda. Mostly, it sounds like a stay-in-place method. But it?s European and they use the metric system and I still struggle with 20% tips so I?m not going to argue too much.

No word yet on whether this kind of consumer credit card will make its way to the States ? or ?across the pond? as they?re fond of saying.