Snail Mail No More!
How paperless mail is gaining ground, or should I say gaining cyberspace
The recent fiasco surrounding T-mobile’s attempt to charge customers $1.50 for each paper bill — which they later had to retract after being sued — seemed to indicate people weren’t ready to go green with their mail. Or at least people weren’t willing to pay for something that was originally free. T-mobile thought that by charging for paper bills, its customers would switch over to paperless, which would save an estimated 10.8 million pounds of paper (equivalent to 13,500 trees) a year and who knows how much of T-mobile’s money. Before the charge, about 1,000 customers signed up for paperless each day, but after the charge was announced, more than 33,000 customers signed up daily to be paper-free. Many of them didn’t sign up with a green smile, however, and T-mobile suffered a public relations debacle.
So will paperless mail still be the next big thing in America?
The future of mail
Yes, it seems that paperless mail is the future. With the right incentives, people are ready to go green with their mail. Zumbox, the world’s first and only paperless postal system, has captured the attention of three major cities in the U.S.- San Francisco, Newark, and recently, New York City. Hopefully, with these cities leading by example, others will embrace the paperless postal system. The mayors of these three cities believe a paperless mail system will be more cost-effective, personal, and environmentally-friendly than traditional postal service.
Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco says paperless mail “supports our commitment to open government by offering a more direct and efficient online connection between the City and our residents. A paperless postal system represents a new opportunity for the City and County of San Francisco to reduce the City’s overall waste stream and will help in our efforts to reach zerowaste by 2020.”
Mayor Cory Booker of Newark exclaims, “Zumbox will help the City to save tax dollars, support our local businesses, and improve the way our city communicates.”
Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York says, “Every day, new technological innovations help make information flow faster, systems work better and our lives a little easier. In serving the public, government should constantly be looking for new and better ways to provide information and services. The City’s pilot program with Zumbox will give us yet another means to get information to New Yorkers.”
What exactly is Zumbox?
Zumbox is a privately-held company based in California, and relies on its unique digital mailbox technology to make waves in the mail industry. Each U.S. address has a digital mailbox, appropriately named a Zumbox, which enables mail, newsletters, announcements, and other documents to be sent as files and received by other Zumbox users. There is no paper, postage, scanning or spam involved. Receiving and sending digital mail couldn’t be more secure or accurate. Zumbox uses precise geo-targeting technology to keep someone’s mail from ending up in another person’s Zumbox, and it complies with PCI, HIPAA, and BITS security standards to keep mail confidential.
Zumbox is free for municipal and state governments and receiving customers, and according to Donn Rappaport, CEO of Zumbox, “In an effort to support local economies, Zumbox is offering a free trial for qualified non-profit organizations and local businesses that wish to use the Zumbox service to send paperless mail to their supporters, customers, or local neighborhoods.”
Disadvantages
The United States Postal Service is the second largest civilian employer in the US. It has around 656,000 employee who earn a living sorting, collecting, handling, and delivering paper mail and packages. In recent years, faxes and e-mail have taken a huge chunk out of USPS revenues, making the formerly profitable entity a huge loser for the U.S. Treasury. So what becomes of these people and their jobs? It would appear that the trend toward electronic mail, even newspapers and magazines, is irreversible and that the government should make plans for the serious downsizing of USPS.
Conclusion
Not only does Zumbox make mail more secure, convenient, and cheaper, going paperless helps our environment. By investing in a Zumbox you can reduce paper consumption, landfill masses, CO2 emissions from paper manufacturing and delivery trucks, and illegal logging.
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October 8th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
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October 11th, 2009 at 10:53 am
The challenges of sustainability and climate change require that we radically transform the media supply chains that business, government and consumers rely on for communication and commerce. However, we can no more afford to entrust our common future to a paperless digital media monoculture than we can afford to allow our primary sources of energy to be based on fossil fuel combustion.
Consumers are justifiably annoyed by “junk mail” but we are also plagued by email spam that represents more than 90% of the trillions of emails sent each year. Both print and digital mail need to be reinvented, and we should experiment with alternatives, but we should allow well intentioned enthusiasm for change to curtail the careful consideration of the lifecycle aspects and impacts of each alternative.
Neither print nor digital media supply chains are sustainable as currently configured and neither incremental change in print nor advocacy for a paperless “silver bullet” digital media solution will measure up to the changes that we must make in the coming decade.
Paper-based mail relies on a complex web of supply chains that are wasteful and inefficient (which are responsible for a significant amount of the world’s economic activity), however we should not assume that the supply chains that paperless mail rely on are without significant negative environmental impacts or that uninformed decisions to “go paperless” is categorically greener and without potential unintended consequences.
Life cycle analysis and systems thinking need to be employed as the basis for informed decision making and advocacy as we change our media consumption and production behaviors. Paperless digital communication media are not a panacea.
Paperless mail relies upon data centers, networks and consumer electronic devices that consume tens of billions of kilowatt hours of coal-fired electrical energy responsible for the emission of an equivalent number of tons of greenhouse gas emissions. Over half of the electrical energy consumed in the US is generated by coal fired power-plants, many of which are fired with coal mined through mountaintop removal that is responsible for significant deforestation, water pollution and biodiversity loss.
It is also important to remember that the computers, consumer electronic devices and network cabling required to support the increased use paperless media do not currently grow on trees. They require the energy intensive extraction and refining of metals and minerals, many of which such as tantalum are “conflict minerals.”
Given the Sierra Club’s dedication to sustainability, I would welcome the opportunity to discuss the issues and assist Sierra Club Greenhome in helping its readers to make informed decisions.
Sincerely,
Don Carli
Senior Research Fellow
The Institute for Sustainable Communication
http://www.sustaincom.org
Twitter: @dcarli
October 14th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
My aunt works at the USPS, and they are worried that there won’t be any jobs left a couple years from now, so while I like this paperless mail thing, I feel bad.
October 14th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
So no more spam anymore? Isn’t paperless mail just emails?
October 16th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
This isn’t only green but its really efficient. I switched to paperless mail a long time ago because it was just easier for me.
October 23rd, 2009 at 12:52 pm
What about those people who don’t have internet? Like senior citizens? Would they have to drive somewhere that has access to computers?
October 27th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
Don: You know I enjoy the conversation about this. The fact of the matter is that the digital infrastructure you refer to is also a huge part of paper media (mail, magazines, newspapers, etc.). It’s a given in today’s digital economy. All paper media starts digital. All of that media is stored on servers and transmitted electronically prior to being converted to paper. Regardless of whether you go paperless with your Verizon bill or not, the digital version is sitting on Verizon’s servers. Converting that digital bill to paper and shipping it across the country represents additional impact, emissions, waste, etc. that would not have otherwise been realized if you accessed the bill in its native, digital format.
The paper industry is the 4th largest emitter of Greenhouse Gases in the U.S. The energy and raw materials that the paper industry uses goes to one thing: paper. It’s the only product. The mail sorters at the USPS do one thing: sort mail. The chainsaws and trucks the industry uses do one thing: cut and transport trees. Data centers and computers, on the other hand, do thousands of things in addition to giving one quick access to digital media. Many of those things improve our lives and create so many types of efficiencies. So the impact is shared by all of those things, many of which won’t show up on a lifecycle analysis. Quality of life is not a factor. Otherwise, it’s a bit like pinning the impact of processing a tree on a single sheet of paper or tacking the GHG emissions of a commercial airline flight on one passenger.
By going paperless, we reduce the additional impacts of converting what already exists in a digital form and converting it to paper. By that measure, it’s pretty clear how far superior paperless is to paper.
Paperless (digital in general) is more efficient than the alternative by many magnitudes. Efficiency is one of the key principles on the path to sustainability. In energy terms, we call them negawatts. Yes, we need abundant, clean renewable energy, but we also need to do more with less. That’s why we have Energy Star and Prius and smart grid technology. At some point, efficiency and renewables will meet in the middle.
November 6th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Good idea…the future will be paperless. I guess the trees will be on a permanent vacation.
November 6th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
Getting mail on the internet seems like a good idea, but, I don’t know if it’s just me or not, I like receiving and holding mail in my hands. I get sick of looking at the computer for too long as it hurts my eyes, I’d rather look at paper. Plus, if we go paperless, what about all those jobs at the post office? Will the USPS no longer exist except for package sending (even that, FedEx is taking over).
November 11th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Im curious to know what the next state to adopt Zumbox will be? Also, what if some people don’t have access to the Internet? What then? Are they being forced to adopt to a Zumbox mail system or can they have the option of opting out of it for paper mail?
November 10th, 2010 at 2:16 am
Bandwidth isn’t free. In fact, it’s become a commodity which private interests like T-Mobile and other tele/comms companies want to hog and then resell at grossly inflated prices. E-mail isn’t a panacea because of the enormous waste of energy most online traffic represents.
We need fewer graphics-heavy sites, particularly those wasteful, irritating, animated ads. We don’t need all those movies and TV reruns to clog up Teh Interntz. Remember the 70s? Remember TV over the public airwaves? Remember (gasp) FREE quality television? Remember when you got letters in your mailbox instead of ads?…