Remember eight hours ago when I went on a little rant about how evil AT&T is, and how their foolish 50-page-long iPhone bills were bound to kill tens of thousands of trees? Well, Muhammad Saleem, who did the original calculations of the wasted paper's arboreal impacts, received a note from an AT&T employee discussing the ways in which AT&T is attempting to mend their mistake.

Now this isn't a high-up employee or anything, but they work at a call center, and so they know when policy changes take place. According to the employee AT&T is switching to a "summary billing" system, where the bills are a normal one or two pages, but extra details are available online. New users will have to pay an extra two dollars to receive the full novella-length bill in their mail box.

Employees of the call center are asked to push paperless billing. However, this still isn't the default state, nor is it cheaper than receiving hardcopy bills. I don't understand this. Just make it default paperless already!

I guess we'll have to wait a few more years for that...though the time sure seems right to me. Anyhow, the anonymous employee finishes the email to Muhammad by saying that AT&T either "just wants to make an extra buck, or really does care about trees and is just trying to sway customers away from viewing their bill on paper, I like to think that they are doing the latter. Though, it’s probably the former. ATT doesn’t have the greatest scruples in the world."

Sounds about right to me.

Via Muhammad Saleem

OK...maybe this picture is a bit of an exaggeration, but 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. Do it now AT&T, or expect more graphics like the one above.

Via Muhammad Saleem and Gizmodo