Ah yes, the kind of mail that makes me cringe more than junk mail… bills. While we still have to pay em there is a way to keep them out of your mail box and save a tree or two, which is nice. Go electric… receive and pay your bills online. The Pay It Green Alliance is encouraging consumers to act to stop the unnecessary flow of paper around our financial lives. They calculate that Americans receive about 26 billion bills and 9 billion paper statements in their mailbox each year. That equals…
- 755 million lbs of paper!
- 9 million trees!
- 512 million gallons of gas to deliver them!
- 19.6 BILLION lbs of greenhouse gas emissions!
Most banks now allow you to pay your bills online and receive your bank statements by email, and most employers offer direct deposit. Making the switch will save you time and money and reduce your carbon footprint. This is one of those very small changes that can make a huge impact. You can go to payitgreen.org to find out how much your financial paper footprint is and learn more about how you can reduce it. [via: ecofabulous]
Matt, thanks for your tip about Pay it Green. Love the blog!
Just wanted to pass along a related article I wrote recently called “How to Stop Junk Mail”: http://www.sparkleize.com/2008/04/19/how-to-stop-junk-mail/
Thanks again,
Crystal D.,
Sparkleizer and Home Organization Expert
http://www.sparkleize.com
E-mail: crystal@sparkleize.com
That’s a lot of mail!
Don’t miss out on http://www.greendimes.com, too. They claim to be able to help reduce catalogs and other junk mail, too, and they pay you a $1 to do it.
Legalize hemp (no, not that other stuff, silly) Use the fiber from the annual crops to make paper. Hemp paper is very tough, and can be recycled many times as paper. Put your bills in the recycle bin, knowing that the annual crop they are made from is recyclable many more times than wood pulp paper and takes only one year to regrow, not twenty years like wood pulp. The bill collector may get high blood pressure, but the environment will suffer less, and the seeds from the hemp crop can be eaten, turned int bio-diesel, made into damn fine paint, or even a good grade margarine!