AT&T's iPhone bills: 70,000 trees per year

There is something strange going on with the way AT&T is billing for the iPhone. If the resources necessary to create this beautiful new device weren't bad enough, AT&T has been providing an itemized list of every single data transfer made by users with every bill. The result is that the bills are, on average, about 50 pages long.

Muhammad Saleem has done some quick calculations and discovered that as many as 70,000 trees will have to be harvested to create the paper necessary for all these bills. Then add in the amount of energy necessary to ship these massive documents all around the country and you might start to question AT&T's environmental conscience.

Of course, this isn't different from the policies of other smart-phone providers, and it is important to note that AT&T offers a paperless online billing system for folks who sign up. But, this system needs change now.

Obviously all iPhone users have access to online billing. Maybe it's time that paperless becomes default, and you have to sign up for paper bills. Frankly, if there's a demographic that won't mind default online billing, it's iPhone users.

Via Muhammad Saleem and Gizmodo