Do 88% of business cards get thrown away? 88% of cards binned in a week? We traced it.

We took four numbers that turn up together on digital card sites, printer blogs and in the press: that 88% of business cards are thrown away within a week (sometimes “in less than a week”), that 10 billion are printed a year, that 27 million are printed a day, and that they cost 7.2 million trees a year. For each one we followed the citation to the page it named, then that page’s citation, until the trail ran out. Where a page no longer exists we read it in the Wayback Machine. Every page below was opened on 23 September 2026.

The short version is in the table. The rest of the page is the working.

Most modern citations point to one of two places: a 2016 post on Adobe’s blog, or CreditDonkey, whose business card statistics page (updated 20 July 2022) says “Of all cards printed each year, 8 billion will be tossed within a week. That’s 88% of cards printed” and lists Adobe as its source. So the question becomes where Adobe got it.

The Adobe post, dated 26 October 2016, carries four numbers and cites nothing for any of them. It also says who wrote it: “This post was written by Silkcards”, with a link to a print company, not by an Adobe researcher. Its four figures are a sales rise of 2.5% for every 2,000 cards handed out, the 88%, 63% of people binning a card because they do not need the service, and colour cards being kept ten times longer. Those are the same four figures, in the same order, as a table on Statistic Brain, a statistics website, four years earlier.

The Statistic Brain page, archived on 26 July 2012, lists “Percent of business cards handed out that will be thrown out in less than a week: 88%”. It names three sources: “CNN, BusinesscardABC, Freelance Folder”, with a verification date of 18 July 2012. It gives no study, no sample and no method for that row.

So we read the three sources. None of them contains the number.

• CNN. The closest match is a CNN article from October 2009 on digital alternatives to paper cards. It quotes Mashable’s editor saying “people get a [business] card and don’t do anything with them”. It gives no percentage and no printing volume.
• Freelance Folder. Its January 2011 post “7 Reasons Why Your Business Card Gets Thrown In the Bin” was written on behalf of the printer MOO. It says “We all collect business cards, and we all throw most of them away.” It gives no figure.
• BusinesscardABC. The archive has no site by that exact name. The nearest is businesscardsabc.com, and its page captured in February 2010 says “more than 90% of business cards wind up in the trash the day they’re received.” It is a different number and a different time frame, and it has no source either. We read the site’s other archived articles and found no 88%.

By 2016 the same Statistic Brain page had added “Statistic Brain Research Institute” to its source list. It had also added a poll “conducted by Statistic Brain Research Institute online from 842 working professional respondents”. That poll asked whether people judge a company by its card; it was not about throwing cards away, and the 88% row sits outside it. Later captures replace the source list with “LOGIN TO VIEW SOURCES”.

The table was already travelling by then. In November 2015 Ryan Holmes’s essay on Medium said “Of the 27-million-plus business cards printed each day in the US alone, 88 percent are tossed away within a week of receiving them”, linking straight to Statistic Brain.

The 2012 Statistic Brain table lists 10 billion cards printed in the US each year and 27,397,260 printed each day. The daily figure is not a second measurement. It is exactly 10 billion divided by 365. Neither number has a source beyond the three pages above, and none of them mentions printing volume.

Then it travelled. An Aura Print blog post, archived in January 2022, took “around 27 million” a day and multiplied it “by just the working days in a year” to reach 7,047,000,000. That is 27 million times 261. In September 2021 the BBC wrote that before the pandemic cards were being printed “around the world. One estimate put it at 27 million per day, or more than seven billion each year”, linking to that Aura post. Wikipedia’s business card article now says “approximately 7 billion business cards were printed around the world every year”, citing the BBC.

That puts two different numbers in circulation. The US figure of 10 billion became a worldwide figure of 7 billion, three billion smaller, because of a working-days multiplication in a printer’s blog post. We are not saying either is wrong. We found nothing to suggest anyone counted.

The earliest dated use we found is a Changeit blog post whose address dates it to 25 June 2021. It says “7.2 million trees can be saved every year” by switching to a digital card, and notes it “was written in cooperation with the Contapp team”, a digital card app. It cites nothing. Wave Connect’s statistics page carries the same figure without a reference. Aura Print’s current post calls it “an estimated average”, again without a source. Blinq’s alternatives post uses a different number, 6 million trees, from a different source.

A tree figure depends on how many cards are printed, how much each weighs and how much paper a tree yields. All three would have to be stated for anyone to check it, and we found no version that states any of them.

Three sources say something real about paper cards, and none of them answers the 88% question.

What this adds up to: paper cards are used less than they were, and the one comparison of their environmental cost we found is closer than the tree numbers imply. What we could not find is any measurement of the thing everyone quotes, which is what a person does with a card after they receive it. If you know of one, with a method, tell us and we will add it here.

Our honest answer on whether paper cards are dead does not need the number. The real weakness of paper is that nobody retypes it into their phone, and that is plain without a statistic. We make that case row by row on digital vs paper business cards.

Cardr makes digital business cards. A statistic saying nearly nine in ten paper cards are gone within a week is about the most convenient fact our category could have. That is the reason to check it rather than repeat it. The claims on this site have to be ones we can source, and this one cannot be sourced.

None of this is a charge against the pages that repeat it. Most cite the page in front of them in good faith, the way citations usually work. The trouble is that each step drops a little context. “Thrown out in less than a week” on a statistics page became “a study from Adobe” in a 2019 LinkedIn post. Adobe hosted it but did not write it. The same number became “according to a recent study” on Tapzo and “according to a survey by CreditDonkey” on Aura Print. Small Business Rainmaker presents it as what “business card naysayers” say, with no link, and Wave Connect cites that page. No hop added a method.

If you want to make the case against paper, there are arguments you can support. A printed card cannot change when your number does. A QR code on the card gets rid of the retyping. And a card handed over gives you nothing back, which is the problem our follow-up guide starts from. If you are going to cite 88%, cite it as what it is: a figure from a 2012 statistics page with no traceable source.

We have since followed the other famous figures back the same way, and keep what we found, with a verdict for each and the figures that do check out, on business card statistics, with the sources checked. That page is re-checked every quarter.