Everybody seems pleased with Bank of China's (BOC) initial public offering (IPO) even before it has actually been floated.

Sponsors get millions of dollars for arranging the deal, individual buyers could make a kill if its share price rises as expected, brokers are all too happy to get commission by helping people buy shares, BOC itself may take home nearly US$10 billion and China Banking Regulatory Commission head Liu Mingkang sees this as another step towards improving the mainland's banking sector.

But there are exceptions.

"It's a mini ecological woe," said Esther Leung, external secretary of Hong Kong-based environmental group Green Sense.

Green Sense says 5,653 trees have had to be chopped down to supply the 333 tons of paper needed to print BOC's prospectuses.

Since its IPO is the largest for a mainland company and the biggest in the world in six years, BOC does need a thick prospectus to tell potential investors every detail of the US$9.8-billion float. From Thursday, more than 250,000 prospectuses have been made available through hundreds of counters across the city.

In a much more vivid description, Green Sense said that if all the prospectuses were to be piled up together, they would be just 1,850 metres lower than Mount Qomolangma, or as tall as 19 Bank of China (Hong Kong) Towers the 367-metre-tall building in Hong Kong's prime business district of Central.

Each prospectus has more than 600 pages and weighs 1.33 kilograms, hence the IPO is a "heavy hit".

"We have tried to suggest them to reduce the number of pages, separate the English and Chinese versions," Leung said. "But all efforts have been in vain."

Green Sense said 64 tons of paper was needed for the ten IPOs in the first quarter of the year in Hong Kong for which 1,100 trees had to pay with their lives.

The group has appealed to the people to visit websites to get an electronic-prospectus instead of hankering after the printed version.