General Electric Co. began offering a credit card in July 2007 that puts aside one percent of cardholder purchases to reduce greenhouse gases from land fills and coal mines.

Considering itself an eco-friendly company, GE hopes to generate $20 billion in sales from environmentally friendly consumer products by 2010 – and this strategy fits in nicely with its desired image — while fueling its own credit lending business to boot. In the past, the corporation has been criticized for its lack of environmental responsibility.

Environmentalists believe the card is more of a marketing ploy to guilt consumers into spending on things they don’t need. Spend $100 and a whopping dollar goes toward a random eco-friendly project?

“It’s in effect trying to lure people into being bigger consumers with a promise of getting instant absolution for their sins,” said Frank O’Donnell, president of non-profit Clean Air Watch. “It’s excessive consumption that’s part of the big problem in the first place.”

But GE and power company AES feel the program establishes standards for creating and selling U.S. greenhouse gas credits. Customer reward dollars can be exchanged for these credits, or the customer can go half-and-half between credits and cash back.

“A person spending $750 a month on the card for 12 months can generate enough reward dollars to offset their direct carbon use for a year,” claims chief marketing officer for GE Money, Tom Gentile.

GE Money issues credit cards for General Electric and on behalf of retailers and other companies and has approximately 58 million cards outstanding globally, worth about $44 billion in receivables outstanding.

This is a guest post from CreditorWeb, an information resource on credit cards and personal finance.