Hosting well5 August 2026 6 min read

What a paperless changeover actually saves

Digital isn't automatically kinder to the planet. I'd rather show you the real numbers — including the ones that don't flatter us — than sell you a comfortable story.

There is a drawer in almost every holiday let I have ever stayed in. You know the one.

Inside: a laminated fire-escape notice from two owners ago, a house manual with the old WiFi password crossed out in biro, four takeaway menus for restaurants that have since closed, and a welcome booklet somebody once paid a print shop to run off fifty copies of.

Nobody reads it. Guests photograph the WiFi code and shut the drawer.

I think about that drawer a lot, because I sell the thing that replaces it. And if I am going to sell you a digital welcome book, I owe you an honest account of what that actually changes — including the parts that don't flatter me.

Let me start with what digital does not do

A lot of my shop is printables. Rental agreements, cleaning checklists, restock sheets, welcome books. They are PDFs, and a great many of them end up on paper, because a cleaner needs something to hold and a tenant needs something to sign.

So if I told you my shop saves paper, I would be telling you something that isn't true. Some of what I sell is designed to be printed. That is the point of it.

What changes is not whether paper gets used. It is how much, and when.

The saving isn't paper. It's the print run.

Here is the difference. The old way is to decide up front that you need fifty welcome booklets, pay for fifty, and store fifty — then change the WiFi password in March and quietly bin forty-one of them.

The new way is that you print the one page you need, on the morning you need it, and when something changes you print that page again.

For a sense of scale: one peer-reviewed study of office paper put a single blank A4 sheet at 4.29 to 4.74 g CO₂e, the range depending purely on which accounting method was used (Dias & Arroja, Journal of Cleaner Production, 2012).

Read that boundary carefully, because I want you to have the real version. That figure runs from the forest to a blank ream landing on your desk, and it stops there. It does not include the printing itself, your printer's electricity, the toner, or what happens to the page afterwards. A sheet you actually print at home emits more than that, not less. It also models a Portuguese pulp mill on 2012 data, so treat it as an indicative benchmark rather than a British number.

I am not going to multiply that by a number I invented and hand you a headline. The honest version is simpler: the waste in printed hospitality material was never one page. It was the forty-one you didn't need.

What genuinely disappears

Some things about a digital download are true without needing a study behind them, because they are just descriptions of how the thing works.

There is no van. Nothing is driven to you.
There is no box, no tape, no void fill, no packing slip.
There is nothing to return, so there is no return journey and nothing to write off.
There is no unsold stock, because there is no stock.

I have deliberately not put numbers on those, and I want to tell you why. I went looking for solid published figures on parcel delivery and returns for this piece, and I could not verify them to a standard I was comfortable printing under my own name. So you are getting the qualitative version instead of a confident-sounding statistic I couldn't stand behind.

The part most shops leave out

Digital is not zero-carbon either.

The International Energy Agency puts global data centre electricity use at around 415 TWh in 2024 — roughly 1.5% of the world's electricity — rising to about 485 TWh in 2025, a 17% increase in a single year.

That growth is driven overwhelmingly by cloud computing and AI training, not by hosting documents like mine. But it is a fair reminder that anything digital carries a real and growing energy cost: data centres, networks, your device, and the electricity to read the file.

There is a nice illustration of where that energy actually goes. When the IEA fact-checked the alarming headlines about streaming video, it estimated that for a typical hour of viewing in 2019, the screen itself accounted for around 72% of the electricity, data transmission 23%, and data centres just 5%. On a phone, which is far more efficient, transmission dominates instead.

Those are streaming-video figures from 2019, not a measurement of downloading a PDF. I am not going to pretend otherwise. But the shape of it holds: the device in your hand is usually the biggest part of the story, and "the cloud" is rarely the villain it gets cast as.

What we actually do, precisely

Every card purchase here contributes 0.5% to CO₂ removal through Stripe Climate, which funds early-stage permanent carbon-removal work.

Now the small print, in full, because you deserve it:

It is 0.5% of card purchases. PayPal orders are outside the programme, because Stripe assesses the contribution against Stripe-processed charges only.
Stripe's own documentation is clear that this kind of percentage-of-revenue commitment takes a portfolio approach — some projects will deliver and some will fail — and that it is not the product to use if you want to make carbon-neutral or net-zero claims.
So I don't make one. This shop is not carbon neutral. A purchase here does not cancel out its own footprint. It funds removal work, and that is all I am claiming.

Why I am so careful with these words

Because being careful is the job.

The Competition and Markets Authority's Green Claims Code sets out six principles for anything a business says about the environment: claims must be truthful and accurate; clear and unambiguous; they must not omit or hide important information; comparisons must be fair and meaningful; they must consider the full life cycle; and they must be substantiated.

Since April 2025, under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, the CMA can decide for itself that consumer law has been broken and issue a fine directly, without going to court.

I could have written you a much prettier article. "Go paperless, save the planet" would have been a lovely headline and I would not have had to spend an afternoon reading a 2012 paper about Portuguese eucalyptus pulp.

But you are a business owner too. You know exactly what it feels like when a supplier tells you something a bit too smooth, and you can't quite find the number underneath it. I would rather be the one you can check.

If you'd like the drawer version of your house manual to become the version guests actually read, the welcome books and guest apps are here. And if you just came for the numbers — I hope they were the honest kind.