Martyn Eustace, director of Two Sides, was recently interviewed by Stephen Rhodes on BBC Radio Northampton on the topic of whether e-billing is better for the environment than paper billing. Some snippets:

It’s not more environmentally friendly, necessarily, to do things electronically, it may be more convenient. ...In reality, when the bank tells you that you’re doing your bit for the environment by going paperless, what it means is that they’re doing it cheaper, they’re not producing the bills and the statement, but they’d like you to do it at home. ... Our issue is not that people want to go electronic; that’s fine. I do it myself, But it isn’t more environmentally friendly.

Mr. Rhodes presses on by insisting (aside from the fact that Mr. Eustace represents the printing and paper industries) that one bill delivered electronically is “a million times more environmentally friendly” than one bill printed and delivered. Mr. Eustace responds:

You have to look at the process of producing and receiving the bill on paper vs. the process of producing and receiving the bill electronically. It’s not a simple comparison.  You cannot do that simple an analysis. People do print out [their bills]... I have a statistic, it was a BBC radio program, actually [Costing the Earth], that one e-mail with a 400K attachment sent to 20 people was the equivalent of burning a 100-watt lightbulb for 30 minutes.

Says the host: “It makes you wonder about all the spam flying around all over the place.” The upshot of the interview is not to condemn electronic billing, or any type of electronic media, but to recognize that it has a cost that is akin to print media’s.