WhatTheyThink's Going Green has joined forces with Two Sides to help address the "perceptions" that paper destroys forests, that electronic media are "greener" than print and paper, and that recycling is the solution to all environmental ills.
Last week, in our discussion of Sprint’s sustainability initiatives, alert reader (and Sprintian) Amy suggested that the number of people who still store printed paperwork was quite low. Whilst I have no specific data on what percentage of people retain hard copies of statements and invoices, I did come across some relevant data in a report published in 2008 called Online Billing Life Cycle Analysis (via TwoSides) prepared by Telstra by URS Australia. Although they didn’t specifically ask any survey respondents about their online-bill printing habits (which is a missed opportunity; I would love to see hard data on that), when calculating the environmental impacts of online billing “In the base case it is assumed that 50% of customers print their online bill.”
Why should you care?
“When approximately 95% of customers print their online bill the global warming impact of an online bill becomes greater than that of a paper bill,” says the report (The global warming impact is one of the factors the study looks at.) As I have said often in this space (and in the spaces that surround it), e- or p-, particularly when it comes to bill delivery, is a personal preference often divorced from issues of environmental sustainability. But if you do prefer a hard copy, it seems better to have the invoicer do the printing—and it will save the invoicee money on paper and toner.
For more Two Sides facts see www.twosides.us/mythsandfacts.
