Does online bill payment aid the environment?

Yes

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by Roy C Dudgeon

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Ecological Efficiency: Replacing Energy & Materials with Information-

Yes, on-line bill payment does aid us in our struggle to create a more ecological and sustainable society. But on-line bill payment is only one small example of the manner in which information can be used to replace energy and materials and increase the efficiency of industrial society.

Efficiency itself, of course, is not usually understood in this way, so allow me to explain before returning to our central topic. Economics tends to think about efficiency in terms of saving time and labor. The faster something can be produced and the fewer the workers the better. Because that's how you maximize profits over the short-term.

Ecology, on the other hand, thinks about efficiency in a completely different way. According to the ecological literature, "efficiency" is defined in terms of making the most efficient use of energy and materials. In other words, if you can do the same job while using less energy and materials, you are doing it more efficiently.

This is also related to the problem of reducing our levels of wasteful consumption and promoting a more sustainable society. That's where information comes in.

The first ecological thinker to emphasize the importance of information in organic (or living) systems was Gregory Bateson (1979). Bateson, in fact, argued that all living systems-from evolution, to ecology, to embryology and growth were fundamentally based upon the exchange of information. This ran counter to much of the ecological literature at the time and since, which tended to reduce ecosystem functioning to the study only of flows of energy and materials (Odum
1989). Bateson's innovative ideas have only begun to be applied to our current problems in the last few years, because he was several decades ahead of his time.

Robert Kates (2000), for example, writes of the importance of combating overconsumption, and increasing the ecological efficiency of our society in an ecological sense. Kates provides the following as a working definition of consumption: "the human transformation of energy, materials and information." He includes Bateson's emphasis upon the centrality of information in the functioning of organic systems because information "completes the triad of the biophysical and ecological basics that support life."

More centrally, he also argues that /substituting/ information for energy and materials can increase the efficiency of our society in an ecological sense. How you might ask?

Well, paying your bills on-line is a good example. Rather than getting in your car and driving down to the bank or utility company, spewing hydrocarbons from your car's exhaust all the way there and back, you can remain in the comfort of your own home. No bills have to be printed up, no trees harvested, no paper manufactured. There is just a transfer of data requiring a minimal amount of energy.

But electronic bill payment is really only the tip of a much larger iceberg! What about email instead of snail mail? Think of all the paper and transportation costs saved by sending messages on-line, as opposed to all the paper and envelopes and transportation costs involved in delivering material packages.

The same is true of electronic publication and distribution of magazines. Magazine publishers normally print at least twice as many copies as they ever sell. These all have to be shipped to market. They remain on the shelves for perhaps a month, and then those that don't sell (as much as 75% for some publications) are all shipped back to the manufacturer for a refund, and (one would hope) recycled without ever having been read. On-line publication involves nothing but an exchange of data.

And the same is true for the distribution of music and video over the Internet. No manufacturing, no transportation, no waste or recycling of obsolete or unsold titles.

Digital photography also uses information to replace energy and materials. Think of the increased efficiency involved in not having to take your film to be developed, and then going back to pick up the double printed copies of all of your pictures, many of which may be blurred or otherwise useless to you. With digital photography your photos are just data which you can store on a hard drive. You never have to print them at all unless you want to, you don't have to develop them with harsh chemicals in a laboratory, and you can send the data to friends anywhere in the world without doing anything other than turning on your computer.

Thus, electronic bill payment is only one small example of the exciting possibilities for energy and material savings which computer technology and the Internet make possible in terms of increasing the sustainability of our society. And the idea of using information to save on energy and materials is only one small part of what the idea of ecological efficiency can do to improve on economic understandings.

After all, from an economic perspective, all that wasted printing and manufacturing and transportation to market is considered an "efficient" way of maximizing profits. It may waste resources and pollute the world, but it is good for the bottom line because it helps the economy to grow.

But as ecology is beginning to teach as, a growing economy and increased consumption are not always a good thing. That is what the ideas of ecological efficiency and sustainability are all about.

References, additional reading:

Gregory Bateson (1979) Mind & Nature: A Necessary Unity, Bantam.

Robert W. Kates (2000) "Population and Consumption: What We Know, What We Need to Know," Environment, April.

Eugene Odum (1989) Ecology and Our Endangered Life-Support System, Sinauer Associates.

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