Today I was trying to organize the piles of mess around my desk and found a few bills to be paid. Paper bills! Why am I still getting those? You'd think I would have been paying bills online exclusively. Isn't that part of green basics?
It was a great wake-up call for me to see all the bills so that I could make a list of which still need to be switched to a paperless payment option.
Scientific American has some cool facts about online billing. We could all guess skipping the paper is a good thing, but did you know:
"Some 53 percent of all U.S. households (61 million) now do their banking online; nearly half of those also pay their bills via computer. But the report says that a whopping 16.5 million trees, roughly 2.3 million tons of wood, could be spared annually in the unlikely event that all U.S. households made the switch to paperless payments. Such a move would also reduce fuel consumption by 26 million BTUs, enough energy to provide residential power to a city the size of San Francisco for a year.
Other major pluses: toxic air pollutants would be cut by 3.9 billion pounds of carbon dioxide equivalents, which is comparable to taking 355,015 cars off the road; waste water would drop by an estimated 13 billion gallons (enough to fill 19,846 swimming pools), and 1.6 billion pounds of solid waste (equal to 56,000 fully loaded garbage trucks) would be eliminated. In addition, the report says, there would be 8.5 million fewer particulates and 12.6 million fewer nitrogen oxides in the air, on par with getting 763,000 buses and 48,000 18-wheelers off the streets."
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3 comments:
I agree. Moving to online payment saves a lot of resources to earth.
But you cann't move everything online these days, in order to stay sane and don't have your desk full of papers I recommend using 42Tags a green application for saving papers... see demo video http://www.42tags.com/video.htm
Those statistics are pretty amazing to say the least! Thanks for pasting them.
hi momgogreen. i wanted to say thanks for the post on snow. i've been thinking about getting up there and its good to have those stats. also, i went to the alemany farmers market last weekend and although there still wasn't a ton of organic produce there was some and tons of people brought their own bags! the general atmosphere was great. there was good music and lots of kids & families!! if they would only get more organics it would really be great!
p.g.
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