Some banks are forever on the lookout for new ways to pitch electronic bill-pay to their customers, and now Wells Fargo & Co. has found a new angle: It's good for our planet's health.
Wells commissioned a study to examine the tree-hugging aspects of electronic bill pay, and released the results Sept. 23. Citing Postal Service data, it concluded: If every U.S. household received and paid all their bills online, it could save 29 trillion BTUs, enough energy to power the city of Jacksonville, Fla., for a year.
"There are so many environmental benefits of electronic bill payment and presentment, and it's not really talked about," said Jim Van Dyke, the founder and principal of Javelin Strategies and Research, the Pleasanton, Calif., firm that conducted the study for the San Francisco banking company.
Though the shift from typewriters to computers in the workplace did not, as was once predicted, lead to a paperless office, Mr. Van Dyke said that receiving and paying bills in digital form does eliminate paper from the payment process because few consumers have demonstrated a desire to print out the electronic bills they receive.
Viewing invoices on the Internet means banks can stop sending paper bills, and consumers can stop mailing back checks. As a result, the industry will consume less paper; that also means fewer trees need to be felled, and less water and energy will be consumed in converting that timber into paper.
Mr. Van Dyke also noted there will be less gasoline consumed and fewer emissions created because there is no need to transport the bills and checks physically. "There are more environmental benefits than meet the eye," he said.
So, exactly how much energy can be saved?
The Postal Service said the average home in this country receives 20 bills a month, yielding a national total of 771,000 tons of paper a year. If all those bills were handled online instead, the study said, the resulting decrease in paper consumption, production, and delivery could save 18.5 million trees, enough to build more than 216,000 single-family homes.
It could also save more than 15.8 billion gallons of wastewater and eliminate 1.7 billion pounds of solid waste a year, the researchers figured. That's about the same amount of garbage generated by the city of Detroit in a year. The change in bill-paying habits would also cut down on air pollutants by eliminating 2.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, roughly the equivalent of having 390,326 fewer cars on the road, Mr. Van Dyke said.
"The environment is very important for many consumers," said Wendy Grover, a Wells Fargo spokeswoman. "If a consumer wants to save paper and help the environment, this is another benefit of electronic banking."
Jim Smith, the senior vice president of Wells' consumer Internet products division, said that nearly 40% of Wells customers bank online and that a third of those 4.2 million customers pay bills on the Web.
A separate study that Mr. Van Dyke's firm conducted on its own concluded that both online banking and EBPP can protect consumers against identity theft. That study, released Thursday, argued that identity theft can often be tied to mailbox theft and that it is thus safer to move the billing and statement process to the Internet.
"By receiving and paying bills online, consumers take the information out of their mailbox and out of reach of those who would fraudulently open an account or make unauthorized purchases on existing accounts," Mr. Van Dyke said in a press release.
