When it was originally invented in 105 AD, paper was a precious product. Today, we just cannot imagine a world without paper. From the contents of our mailboxes to the currency in our wallets, from the rolls we use to clean our kitchen counters to the card boxes in which we get our cereal, paper is never far from the picture.
And neither are our efforts to protect the environment.
While we are consciously seeking ways to reduce the impact on the environment – recycling, using renewable sources of energy and reducing waste, we cannot ignore the number of paper invoices corporate America generates each year. Here is some food for thought:
- The United States alone consumes more than 82 million tons of paper each year. Though the U.S. has only 5 percent of the world’s population, it consumes 33 percent of the global paper production.
- Businesses within the U.S trade in excess of 13 billion invoices annually, which accounts for more than 25 billion pieces of paper that are floating around offices each year.
- Invoices are responsible for 10 percent of all trees cut down worldwide and creating paper invoices uses as much electricity each year as the consumption of 20 million households.
- A year’s worth of invoices take up as much landfill space as 10 football fields each stacked more than 100 feet deep with paper.
The case for electronic invoicing has already been made in terms of time and cost savings. But the environmental impact of e-invoicing is not insignificant either. Migrating even 50 percent of our current paper invoice volume over to electronic documents can deliver the following benefits:
- Getting rid of 12 billion pieces of paper means saving almost one million trees and 240,000 tons of paper every year.
- Slashing paper invoicing by half also translates to reducing our carbon dioxide (CO2) footprint by almost 250,000 tons.
It is clear that, in addition to the monetary savings that e-invoicing brings, there are a number of environmental benefits as well. So make your corporate mantra “Go Green, Save Green.”
Assumptions:
• 1 million invoices = 133 trees
• 1 million invoices = 36 tons of carbdon dioxide (CO2) footprint
• 1 tree = 9,000 pieces of paper
• 1 million invoices = 20 tons of paper
Good viewpoint. We at Basware were putting up similar calculations about a year ago for our einvoicing prospects and got one interesting from one of our interoperability partners Pagero. According to this the transition from paper to einvoicing would save over 14 million trees in the EU alone yearly. Getting rid of the estimated 20 billion yearly paper letters in Europe would mean saving of;
* 400,000 tons of paper
* 12 million trees
* 2,700 tons of ink
* 165 million litres of diesel and
* 1,350 GWh of energy
The energy required for putting out a 1 sheet paper invoice equals to burning a 40W lamp for one month ! How many lamps are you lighting each day?