Once in a while I’m asked “what makes you special?” It’s hard to give an honest answer other than “I’m not a snowflake, there’s nothing really unique about me”. Even my most esoteric pursuits form great tribes around them. The raison d’être of Putanumonit is that whatever peculiar idea I can write about, it will resonate with at least a thousand people somewhere in the world.
With that said, I probably have a pretty singular reaction to utility company vans.
Most people would pass by this truck and not think twice about it. Most wouldn’t even think once. I pass by this truck and think: 20% of household is like 20 mil, so 10 households per tree per year sounds completely made up and I’ll bet 5:1 that this number is off by at least a factor of 2 and ConEdison are lying because everyone is innumerate.
Then I get home and do some Googling:
- There are 125 million households in the United States. Generously assuming that they all get electrical bills, 20% of them are 25 million households.
- My own bill from ConEdison is 2 pages. If ConEdison cared about trees they’d use double sided printing, but let’s be generous again and assume 4 total pages of paper statement per household per month, including the envelope and the check.
- A letter sized page is 8.5″ x 11″, or 216 mm x 279 mm, which comes out to 0.06 m2. Four pages have an area of 0.24 m2.
- We needed the area calculation because paper weight is measured in GSM, or grams per square meter. Common printer paper weighs 74 GSM, so 0.24 square meters of that paper weigh 74 x 0.24 = 17.7 grams.
- 17.7 grams of paper per month * 12 monthly bills = 213 grams of paper per year per household that refuses to pay their bills online.
- With 25 million households, that’s 5.3 million kg of paper per year.
- 24 trees make 1 ton of printer paper, so a single tree makes 41.7 kg.
- 5.3 million / 41.7 = 127,000 trees.
Not “almost two million”, not even within an order of magnitude of two million. A mere 127,000 trees. For scale, that’s 0.25% of the 50 million trees a single country can plant in a day.
By the way, did I mention that I worked for a major paper manufacturer? American paper companies practically never log new forests. They mostly own the tree farms, which are basically small private forests, that supply the timber they need. Also, a fiber of paper can get recycled around 7 times before it becomes unusable, but often get recycled less because paper is so cheap that some recycling isn’t worth it on the margin.
If 100% of American households switched to unrecycled paper bills tomorrow, the paper industry would react by increasing the recycled paper content in products like paper towels and toilet tissue and recycling paper more times. They’ll also plant more trees in the tree farms, and supply will catch up to demand over a few years. If 100% of households switched away from paper, the tree farms (which in the process of growing into paper do nice things like capture CO2 ) would be replaced by something else, like parking lots.
Here’s what ConEdison is really telling you:
I just wanted to remind you that Putanumonit is your only hope in a world that’s constantly using fake numbers to bamboozle you, and since this post was really short you have enough time to take the Putanumonit survey and help make this blog even better.
PUTANUMONIT 
Still loving you!
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(not actually serious)
A lot of these calculations magically convert CO2 costs to trees somehow. You should factor in the CO2 cost of transporting the paper!!
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I’d love to know the ecological footprint of the e-bills. Higher than we imagine, I suspect.
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I’d bet that in the grand scheme of how the planet does, paper vs. e-bills is a rounding error.
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All paper and cardboard on Earth might be enough. https://www.statista.com/topics/1701/paper-industry/
406.5 million tons = like 10 billion trees
https://persquaremile.com/2013/10/21/one-region-400-billion-trees/ Amazon has like 400 billion trees, so this is one-fortieth of the Amazon. That’s how much area we use for paper. It’s like 53,000 square miles (one fortieth of the Amazon). This is not insignificant, so everyone using virtual things might allow us to save more paper.
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Does this mean the carbon burial due to paper bills won’t actual fight the greenhouse effect significantly?
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I googled the cost of a sheet of paper, and found that Staples has an offer of 5000 pages at $29.99 at a grand price of $0.005998 the sheet. (http://www.staples.com/Copy-Resume-Multipurpose-Paper/cat_CL140691).
Assuming ConEdison serves all 25 million households and uses 4 pages per month, that’s 1.2 billions sheets per year. At $0.006 the page, that is 7,2 million dollars.
Assume now that all americans are gullible. If 20% of them paid their bills online, then CodEdison would save 1,5 million dollars, which gives you $750.000 per senator.
I had my doubts, but I think that seems about right.
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Don’t forget the paper used in the envelopes and postage stamps.
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Sign on the truck says, “pay your bills online”, not “pay your con ed bills online”. Two pages an mailed bill is lowballing it, usually you get some kind of advertising stuff in with the bill, sometimes amounting to 4 or 5 pages. You really want me to write a check, lick a stamp, and stuff an envelope when I can just do auto pay just because you work for a paper company?
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Valid point, it does say all their bills, and paper bills aren’t just coming from ConEdison. What about other utilities, credit cards, etc? All in, it is probably pretty close. However, the fact that almost all harvesting is from farms and not forests does make it a rather counter-productive idea. New growth is much more active in converting CO2 to oxygen than old growth.
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