Green Mages: Ultimate Guard Return to Earth Boulder
Have you ever stopped to think about what your deck boxes are made out of or what kind of impact they have on the environment? Ultimate Guard has and they've come up with quite the solution.
Welcome to the first installment of our newest series: Green Mages, an article series where we will be exploring the intersection between two of my biggest passions: Sustainability and Magic: the Gathering.
Magic is on a growth trajectory never before seen in its history. In February of 2023, Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks announced that Magic is Hasbro’s first billion-dollar brand.1 Whether you see this growth as a good or a bad thing, one of the critical questions that no one seems to be asking, especially for a brand and company of this size, is:
“What impact does this game have on the planet?”
That question is the genesis behind this series. Over the lifetime of “Green Mages”, I want to shed light on the operations and impact that Magic: the Gathering has on the planet and bring attention to issues that need to be addressed. I am also going to highlight products, practices, and innovations that are making Magic a greener space that we as a community can adopt.
If you want to read more about the series and what it means to me you can check out the intro here.
In this inaugural entry I want to highlight my favorite deck boxes and one of the few truly sustainable gaming products on the market today: the Ultimate Guard Return to Earth Boulder.
If you were to go right now and open up the closet, drawer, box, or wherever it is you store your Magic cards how many deck boxes jammed full of cards would you find? Five? Ten? Maybe even Twenty plus? Even further, how many have you thrown away over the years? That answer likely varies on how long you have been playing the game, but those of us that have been playing for a long time know that is easy to accumulate accessories like deck boxes.
But of all those boxes, do you know what any of them are actually made of? Or the impact that the manufacturing of them has on the planet?
You don’t need to be a sustainability expert to know that plastics carry their fair share of environmental issues. Sure, the material is sturdy and versatile which is why it has become so prolific across the world, but it comes at a cost. According to the Center for Environmental Law, “If plastic production and use grow as currently planned, by 2030, these emissions could reach 1.34 gigatons per year—equivalent to the emissions released by more than 295 new 500-megawatt coal-fired power plants.” 2
Plastics also take a long time to break down, at best crowding space in landfills and at worst polluting our oceans and waterways damaging ecosystems and leeching into food supplies. Some of the most common materials used to make deck boxes are polypropylene and polystyrene which can take anywhere from 30 to 50 years to break down and decompose. 3
Although they may seem innocent, the products we choose to purchase (and more importantly the products companies choose to make), will have a lasting impact on the planet. And with so much of the gaming accessory space being void of insight into the materials and manufacturing required to produce these boxes we are left wondering what impact our simple choices may ultimately end up having.
That is, except for the Ultimate Guard Return to Earth (RTE) Boulder.
I had the opportunity to sit down with David Kreisl, the Senior Content Manager at Ultimate Guard to talk about the RTE Boulder and I left feeling even more impressed by the product than I thought I would (which is saying a lot because I have been an evangelist of this product since its launch). All of my decks are housed in RTE Boulders and now knowing even more about the product I will never go back.
I wanted to start by saying:
1. Thank you to David and to Ultimate Guard for taking the time to sit down with me. They were extremely transparent about the product and its impact, even in a very small interview, which says a lot about the company and what they are trying to accomplish.
2. This is not a paid sponsorship. I personally reached out to them because I wanted to know more about the product. All support of the product is my own and not by way of sponsorship from Ultimate Guard.
So what is the Return to Earth Boulder?
The Return to Earth Boulder is a deck box made from an innovative material which David described as a “special mixture of different materials, most of [which] is actually a byproduct from manufacturing paper/wood waste.”
The box comes in two different sizes, the “100+” and the “133+”. The 100+ Boulder is made up of 97% of this material and the 133+ is made up of 84% of this material. That means that between 84 and 97 percent of these boxes (depending on the size) are made of paper and wood that would have otherwise just been discarded as waste, but instead have been given new life in these boxes. The other remaining percentages are materials essential for cohesion.
As a sustainability nerd, this is incredibly exciting! Waste is such a big part of all of our lives and the more that we can utilize this waste and give it a new and better purpose the less that ends up just sitting around in a landfill.
In the case of the RTE boulder, this also means fewer trees have to be cut down to create the box. Using waste paper and wood means that those trees were already used for other purposes and no new wood material needs to be used in the manufacturing process.
Which I know means a lot to Ultimate Guard because the wood they use comes from their own backyard. They are based in Germany and all the waste wood and paper used to create the RTE Boulder comes from trees in either Bavaria, the largest state in Germany, or the Black Forest, the largest forest in Germany.
The Black Forest is a place that some Magic players may unintentionally be connected to as well. Years ago Magic printed special edition lands, known today as the Euro Lands, which depicted real places across Europe, and the Black Forest was featured as one of the three forests in the set. In a beautiful example of the circularity of nature, you can play a green deck packed full of lands depicting the Black Forest in a box made from wood from that same forest. That idea brings a big smile to my face (and kind of makes me want to brew another deck).
So we know what the box is made of, but how is it produced?
The details shared on how it is actually manufactured weren’t very explicit, but one of the things David emphasized was that Ultimate Guard is striving to keep the supply chain of the RTE Boulder (and all their products for that matter) short. They source the material from their backyard and the manufacturing takes place only, “five kilometers from our headquarters”.
Having production so close to where the material is sourced has a significant reduction on the overall carbon footprint of a product. Heavy-duty trucks, which are the primary mode of shipping transport across the world, emit somewhere in the range of 132 g of CO2 per kilometer.4 Added up this has some dramatic effects. In 2021 in the US, medium and heavy-duty trucks accounted for a total of 417 million metric tons of CO2 emissions which is 23% of the total carbon emissions from the transportation sector.5
Ultimate Guard has also strived to “greenify” the energy that goes into the manufacturing process. Both their headquarters and their manufacturing facilities are powered mostly by solar energy.
In addition to responsible material sourcing and clean energy powering the manufacturing, the packaging on the RTE Boulder is entirely grass paper, a fully recyclable low-carbon packaging made from grass, that has been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, the leading certification for sustainable packaging.
On top of all of this Ultimate Guard has partnered with One Tree Planted and has committed to planting 4 trees a day. On this David said, “The cooperation with One Tree Planted was just a natural fit as the RTE Boulder is made of wood for the most part. We plant 4 trees a day and we will continue to do so. There are no plans to stop doing it in the future.” Since the RTE Boulder was released in 2021 Ultimate Guard has planted 12,642 trees and counting.
A Truly Sustainable Product
From the top to the bottom this product is one of a kind. It is thoughtful, intentional, and truly sustainable. This is a model product for others to look at to see what is possible. It may seem silly to laud something as simple as a deck storage box, but truly this product is a quintessential example of what companies can create responsibly.
And this was created entirely out of love and passion for the planet. When I asked what caused them to want to build this, I expected them to say that some outside pressure, be it regulation or otherwise, was the driver, but was met with the opposite response. David emphatically told me that, “internal passion” was what built this project. Ultimate Guard spent their time and resources to create this product because they wanted to, not because they were forced to.
We see a lot of greenwashing out in the world today. Companies will slap a picture of a tree or a recycling symbol on their packaging and call it a “green” product, without giving any time or attention to how it’s made or where the inputs come from.
I can say definitively that that is not the case for the Ultimate Guard RTE Boulder. They have taken the time to think through every aspect of the product and have built a deck box worthy of both the planet and the cards you put inside of it.
The next time you need to buy a new deck box I would highly highly encourage you to give the RTE Boulder a try. Not only is it a high-functioning product, but it is a product built with a purpose. Being made from almost entirely renewable material you can be confident your purchase is doing good by the planet and will last you for years to come. I fully believe this product is worthy of any Green Mage.
https://hasbro.gcs-web.com/news-releases/news-release-details/hasbro-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2022-financial
https://www.ciel.org/project-update/plastic-climate-the-hidden-costs-of-a-plastic-planet/
https://8billiontrees.com/carbon-offsets-credits/carbon-ecological-footprint-calculators/plastic-carbon-footprint/
https://8billiontrees.com/carbon-offsets-credits/carbon-ecological-footprint-calculators/truck-co2-emissions-per-km-calculator/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1120519/us-med-heavy-trucks-vehicle-ghg-emissions/#:~:text=Medium%2D%20and%20heavy%2Dduty%20trucks,increased%20by%20roughly%2078%20percent.
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