[LINK] Greenhouse contribution of letters
Tom Worthington
Tom.Worthington at tomw.net.au
Fri Apr 4 08:52:18 AEDT 2008
At 06:26 AM 1/04/2008, Stephen Wilson wrote:
>Has anyone seen any analysis of the contribution to greenhouse of
>paper letters ...
The US Postal Service is studying the contribution of letters to CO2
emissions <http://www.usps.com/environment/greenhousegas.htm#H5>. But
then they claim that advertising mail reduces harmful emissions, by
informing consumers and so reducing shopping trips. So I am not sure
how credible the research they fund is.
By my own back of the (recycled) envelope calculations, an airmail
letter from Canberra to Brisbane produces about 136 g of CO2
equivalent and this is one hundred times as much as email.
Here is the calculation, with more at
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2008/04/greenhouse-gas-from-paper-versus.html>:
A sheet of A4 paper weighs about 5 g
<http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/professional/reference/paperweight.php>.
An envelope and stamp will weight about 7 g.
This gives a total of 12 g for a letter.
For a flight of around 2500km, 0.1260 kg per km of CO2 is produced to
transport a passenger
<http://climate-wise.com/calc/fnpw005/active/content/Emision_calc.htm>.
The standard weight for a passenger is 77 kg
<http://www.caa.govt.nz/publicinfo/media-rel-weight_survey.htm>.
So that works out to about 1.64 g of CO2 per km per kg of cargo, or
0.14 g per letter per km.
A letter which went 1,000 km (about the distance from Canberra to
Brisbane) would produce about 136 g of CO2 equivalent.
>And what might be the marginal greenhouse improvement of using e-mail instead?
My estimate is that a 20 kbyte e-mail message (one A4 page
equivalent) produces one gram of CO2 per year
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2007/10/one-gram-per-message-program.html>.
So email would be much better, as long as you did not keep the
message online too long.
However, if the letter was only being transported a few tens of km
within the same city by road, then the CO2 emissions for the paper
letter would drop to under one gram. This would then might be more
than an email message kept online a long time.
Obviously it is possible to reduce the impact of long distance paper
mail by transporting it most of the way electronically and printing
it near its destination. About twenty years ago I helped interface a
system at the Department of Education to Australia Posts' system to
do this. Setting it up was complex, but it worked reasonably well.
This should now be easy to do with standardized Internet based protocols.
Australia Post have a service called eLetter, which seems to be for
printing and delivery of mail. Unfortunately Australia Post seems
have a very poor quality web site, making it difficult to find out
about the service < http://www.eletter.com.au/>.
Also they seem to be concentrating on helping send more junk mail,
with services such as Easy Post: <http://www.ausposteasymail.com.au>.
Large mail users, such as the federal government could send
correspondence to the nearest capital city electronically for local
delivery. Apart from saving greenhouse gases, this would save money.
Setting up a system for the whole of the Australia Government would
be no harder than the system I helped build for one agency twenty years ago.
Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617 http://www.tomw.net.au/
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, ANU
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