I was paying some bills, and several pieces of brightly-printed glossy paper were included with one of the bills. One of these pieces of paper encouraged me to "save trees" by signing up for an automatic billing plan.
"Make bill paying easy on the environment," it went on to say.
If the vendor really cared about cutting down trees, they could have printed this note on the bill itself, or even on the envelope, thereby reducing paper use. But, sadly, their intent has nothing to do with saving the environment and everything to do with making sure that they can extract monthly payments from customer accounts without concern about whether a customer might be tardy.
As it is, I already pay this and other vendor’s bills online and therefore use neither paper nor postal service vehicles when doing so. To this vendor’s claim about saving trees, I say, save your breath.