PayItGreen Alliance

The coalition is a collaborative industry effort to raise national awareness of the environmental benefits of reducing paper in financial transactions. The Alliance is building online tools and resources, engaging vertical markets, and conveying messages through various media channels.

Specifically, the multi-pronged effort involves reaching out to:

• Institutions - "The Alliance is asking businesses such as energy, telecom, cable, mortgage and insurance companies to assess their business practices; to ask within their organizations if there are processes that could help consumers stop the paper; and to make it easy for their customers to act on their decisions by actively communicating that these services are available." To that end, the Alliance is providing financial institutions with consistent messaging, information, "white label" materials, and tools to use with their corporate and consumer customer base/audience. For example, a dedicated website for businesses features information, tips, and toolkits designed to educate financial institutions as well as to provide them with the concrete resources needed to launch their own programme for customer adoption of greener electronic transactions. A 3-step process is outlined and expanded for those seeking to plan and execute such a campaign: Learn & Inform, Assess & Plan, and Market & Communicate.
• Consumers - The Alliance is informing and educating consumers of the environmental benefits to electronic payments (and electronic billing). A visitor to the PayItGreen Alliance website can "get the facts", learn the reasons to make the switch to paperless payments, and find out (by using a "green calculator") how much paper, water, gasoline, greenhouse gases, etc. he or she would save in one year by making electronic payments.

To spread the word, the Alliance is also providing consumer news article placement (print and online), media interviews, video and audio news releases, radio tours, and speaking opportunities at industry events.

Environment.

Research carried out by Dove Consulting in December 2007 reveals that, in 2006, 19 billion bills - 533 million pounds of paper - were delivered to American households by the U.S. Postal Service. It requires an estimated 235 million gallons of fossil fuels to transport this much paper, resulting in more than 1.3 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

A 2007 survey by Javelin Strategy and Research revealed that if all US households received and paid their bills electronically, the country would:

• Save 16.5 million trees each year, or the amount of lumber needed for 216,054 typical single-family homes;
• Reduce toxic air pollutants by 3.9 billion tons of CO2 equivalents, akin to taking 355,015 cars off the road; and
• Reduce by 1.6 billion pounds the solid waste generated in a year, equal to 56,000 fully loaded garbage trucks.