TREES covering an area half the size of a football ground could be saved each year if a telecoms company succeeds in persuading its customers to switch to paperless billing.
Unicom, which is based in Manchester and has a regional headquarters in Newcastle, is seeking to convert its business customers to online billing. Spokesman Tony Eagleton said: "Currently, Unicom provides telephone services for about 70,000 business customers, each one of which requires a monthly invoice detailing their service charges.
"For each of those customers, an average of four pages will be used in a monthly invoice, including the envelope.
This equates to using 280,000 sheets of paper per month, and works out at more than 3.3 million sheets of paper per year on invoices alone.
"Our research shows that the average tree can produce about 8,500 sheets of paper, which equates to 34 treesworth of paper every month, or more than 400 trees a year.
"If every Unicom customer signed up for e-billing, trees covering an area the size of Trafalgar Square would be saved from deforestation - that's an area about half the size of the football grounds in most towns and cities."
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