Telstra’s Life Cycle Assessment: The Impact of Billing on the Environment Turlough Guerin Group Manager Environment Telstra Corporation Melbourne, Australia

Summary Results: Environmental impacts of online billing are less than those associated with paper billing. Results are reversed under particular conditions Implications: Maximise OLB server utilisation Encourage customers not to print Engage with print contractor/server suppliers OLB since 1999 There are business benefits of going to OLB But there are also barriers to moving customers to OLB In this context, the online billing team asked: what are the environmental benefits of moving from paper to online billing? Results: Environmental impacts of online billing are less than those associated with paper billing. Results are reversed under particular conditions Implications: Maximise OLB server utilisation Encourage customers not to print Engage with print contractor/server suppliers

What we did In context of looking for drivers to encourage uptake of the OLB product, the OLB Team asked: what are the environmental benefits of moving from paper to online billing? Undertook life cycle assessment (http://www.nowwearetalking.com.au/ca rbon/research)

The Results For 1 million individual customer bills (or equivalent) sent by Telstra, there is a saving of approximately 20 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions and 39,000 reams of paper when the customer chooses an OLB only format (and prints 50% of their online bills). I’ll focus on greenhouse gas impacts or (global warming potential) 3 aspects of this No. of bills Energy use of servers No. of customers who print their bills The surprise to us with the results was that the difference between OLB and conventional billing was more than the difference between the paper impacts Click Slide 6

Three critical factors influenced the environmental impact number of customers receiving OLB energy used by the OLB servers number of customers who receive OLB and print their bill out on local printers These are illustrated in the following 3 slides which are the outputs from the sensitivity analysis conducted as part of the life cycle assessment

Global warming impact (difference between online billing and paper billing) associated with varying numbers of online bills produced No. customers who print bill impact the environment At 50% that is equivalent to savings 19 g CO2/bill At 10% that is equivalent to saving 36 g CO2/bill (ie doubling of savings) NB: Base case represents approximately 43 million bills per year and 3.8 Million OLB customers (source: http://www.nowwearetalking.com.au/carbon/research)

Global warming impact (difference between an online bill and a paper bill) for the energy use by servers

Global warming impact (difference between online billing and paper billing) associated with the percentage of customers who print their online bill

Implications A minimum of at least 70% of the billing volume being received online is needed to realise the environmental benefit of OLB If more than 95% of online customers print their online bill there is no environmental benefit from OLB Take home messages: Maximise OLB server utilisation Encourage customers not to print Engage with print contractor/server suppliers