Not worth the paper it's written on: why telcos should conspire to Kill the Bill

We hear about climate change and caring for the environment day-in and day-out, but many of us don’t think twice about opening the mail each day and sifting through all those paper bills, the biggest and meanest of which is usually from a telco.  Mine certainly is.

I buy and test products from a few providers and my main telco provides me with three post-paid mobile services, my broadband access, my digital home and office phones, public WiFi access, HSPA dongle for my notebook and a myriad of cable channels bundled into packages that Einstein couldn’t decipher. For these services I receive no less than five bills on a monthly basis and one other (whenever I use that particular service by mistake!).

Each bill averages three to five pages in length plus the envelope it is sent in, plus another pre-paid envelope supposedly provided to send back my cheque payment that I have never done in seven years because I pay electronically through my bank account.

If we count each of the envelopes as a sheet of paper, I calculate that my telco bills from the one supplier amount to about thirty sheets of paper per month, almost or 360 per year. According to Conservatree (www.conservatree.com), one tree, 40 feet (12m) tall and 6 to 8 inches (15 to 20cm) in diameter produces 8,333 sheets of virgin A4 paper.

One ream (500 pages) needs 6% of a tree to be produced. A quick calculation tells me that my annual telco bills use up about 5 per cent of a tree. To add to my other vices I am now a tree killer!

But that is not of my own doing or choice. Although e-billing is offered by many of the world’s leading service providers, many lag behind. My service provider still does not offer e-billing to its post-paid customers.