I may have to relinquish my Luddite card. I boarded a plane with an electronic boarding pass. Paperless!

Granted, I may have earned demerits for taking a short flight to Chicago. It seems intuitive that driving would have been greener, although checking sites like grist.com or about.com allows you to calculate the greenhouse emissions of any trip. But time was of the essence, and I had little.

And it was a must-go trip. As president-elect of the Ann Arbor Area Board of Realtors, I had to attend the Leadership Summit of the National Association of Realtors. It wasn't until moments before I was to leave for the airport that I realized that I had not printed my boarding pass. Luckily, my partner was there.

Always an early adopter, Sandi had already found the electronic boarding pass feature available on Smartphones. I used my new iPhone to check in for my flight. Moments later, Delta had texted me a QR code. I grabbed my bag and headed out.

I must admit I was a little nervous. How do I use this black and white square on a screen instead of a tangible piece of paper? At the airport, it was click, read and go.

There was only one other person boarding with a QR code, a man of about 50 who'd been using this method for two years. He looked at me conspiratorially and then at the pile of boarding passes at the check-in counter: "Look at all the paper. Look at the waste."

It's a small thing, this QR code, that could eventually rack up many, many green points.

Linda Lombardini lives with a lot of paper at work and at home and treats it all as greenly as possible. You can contact her at Linda@TrilliumRealtors.com.