Hey everyone, I am Eric Rochow and this Real World Green. A web video show about practical things you can do to reduce your impact on the Earth. Today’s subject is really, really straight forward. How many of these do you get in the mail every month?
These are all your monthly bills—credit cards, mortgage payment, bank statement. If you are opted for online bill payments and getting your statements online, you have reduce your impact on the earth in a very simple way. We would not be getting all these papers, We would not be paying for the transportation to transport this paper to you—pretty green and pretty simple.
It is estimated that if every household in United States, and that is a lot to go, I admit, opted to pay their bills online, instead of going with the pay-per-payment method, we would save 29 trillion BTUs of energy each year, and that is British Thermal Unit, that is a lot of energy—the energy needed to print these bills, to make the paper, to transport these bills to your house—all of that is saved.
We would keep 1.7 billion pounds of waste out of the waste stream, in other words the waste paper and that sort of thing—that is very significant. You can pay your bills on line a number of ways.
You can go to each company site that you want to make a payment too. You can go to your credit card company site, you can go to your mortgage bank site, or just go to the site of your bank where you do your checking. They usually offer online banking they call it, or online checking and you can setup here automatic payments to your mortgage, to your credit card, to your phone bill. And then you set it up once and it just goes, it is really kind of simple. In that way you avoid any late fees, because some of us forget to pay bills sometimes—bang, $30 fee, that hurts, probably not very green either, late fees. You could buy some trees with that.
All right, that is Real World Green for today, thanks for watching. Please tell your friends about the show, send us an email and tell us what you think. If you have an idea for a show, I would really love to hear from you, eric@realworldgreen.com is the email address. And have a good one, all right.
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