Citizens Bank program gives customers an incentive to go paperless

Participants in Citizen Bank's Green$ense program will receive a debit card made of recycled plastic.

Get paid to pay your bills, and help the Earth, too. That's the concept behind a marketing program from Citizens Bank that officially debuts today.

Under the "Green$ense" program, customers who opt to stop receiving paper statements and bills each month will be credited a dime for every electronic transaction they make, whether it's a debit card purchase or an online banking transaction.

Citizens estimates the average customer will annually conserve 24 square feet of forest and 6.6 pounds of paper, cut greenhouse gas emissions by 175 pounds, and reduce gas consumption by 4.5 gallons. Its calculations are based on US Postal Service research that found the average household in 2006 received 19 monthly bills and statements by mail, while making about seven payments.

Participants - who can earn up to $120 a year - will receive a Green$ense debit card made of recycled plastic. Currently, only about 10 percent of Citizens Bank customers opt to go paperless. The bank has about 260 Massachusetts branches.

Chief marketing officer Theresa McLaughlin could not say how much money Citizens stands to save by eliminating paper, postage, and bill processing. But if a million customers in the 13 states it serves sign up for Green$ense, the bank estimates it will save at least 700,000 pounds of paper and almost 7 million gallons of water annually. According to McLaughlin, that is the equivalent of taking 800,000 cars off the road, planting 200,000 trees, or canceling 50,000 cross-country flights.

Those numbers sound impressive to Jeremy Marin, a spokesman for Environment Northeast, a nonprofit environmental advocacy organization with offices throughout New England.

"That's a pretty dramatic example of how saving costs on fuel, on paper, can really help the environment and save big businesses at the same time," Marin said. "None of these actions are going to single-handedly change the climate, but cumulatively these are the kinds of steps we need to take as individuals and businesses."

Erin Ailworth can be reached at eailworth@globe.com.