When lots of people started using lots of computers, one of the surprises was that contrary to the expectations, people were using MORE paper. I’m wondering if that’s still the case. Is paper use still going up? Is the widespreading use of laptops related to this question?
This is probably true in general, at least for the time being. I would be interested in seeing the trends of paper use in offices through the last two decades though.
I think the key to saving paper doesn’t lie specifically with computers. Computers by themselves don’t help save paper. Typically you have something on paper you transfer to the computer, then when you need to pass it on, you print it off and give it to somebody.
Networks are great about saving paper though. You can send a lot of data through the network. The internet and email make this very helpful. I don’t know how many people print their emails, but probably not a whole lot. I imagine emails allow more messages being sent, messages that normally wouldn’t be sent via paper, so it’s hard to look at it and say with certainty that it saves paper.
Some places don’t have very good internetwork communications. For example at a school our class is designing a data system, they take financial applications which go through the department, are passed onto another department for review and then are passed to the accounting department (and financial aid dept). Each time information from each step gets entered into the computer, it is printed and mailed or hand delivered to the next department. Very inefficient, but they have no inter-department network system. It could save them time and money to have it all centralized and a better electronic system set up.
Overall, my WAG is that more paper is being used. Mostly because of daily inefficiencies like this (why print a report, give it to your boss and your boss enter the data into a database and throw it away instead of sending it electronically). Other wastes are people printing stuff on the net. With high costs of ink though, I would imagine people don’t do this often, at least not at home. Probably at work.
I believe the original thinking was simply that information would now exist in electronic form, eliminating the need for paper. Except for e-mails and the SDMB, I think that has not been the case. Whatever is on a disc or filed someplace, at least in the business world, I’d imagine, is also on paper someplace. But maybe that trend has changed over the years, too.
I dont think business email saves much paper. I think it cuts down on the phone bill. Most of the stuff sent on email would have been discussed over the phone, not via snail mail.
I don’t think it has changed, but I think it is changing. Just going by the three or four people I know that work in an office and my own part time job in one, we don’t keep records on paper here. I work in the Human Resources Department of a State University and all of our student records, employee records, AAP records, et al, are all electronic. We print reports as needed, and some things still get printed and sent to other departments, but for the most part it is all electronic.
My friend works for IT in a warehouse that went with a wireless inventory system. They used to use stickers for tracking. Now they use a paper invoice rather than a sticker for each product AND a paper inventory. They have cut down on paper costs greatly. In the office, I don’t know.
My other two friends report that they print a lot of unnecessary things, but almost all records have switched to all electronic or are in the process of doing so. I think there is that trend of upgrading occuring.
Actually, I’ve heard that Sarbanes-Oxley has reversed the trend towards electronic documents somewhat. Faced with SOX compliance, many companies are opting to keep paper copies of records they had previously been maintaining in electronic form. The legal system still prefers paper records, when you get right down to it.
They’re not using the right document management system. We’re actually decreasing the number of paper documents because of SOX.
It’s much easier to have one system of record (the DMS) than it is to be wondering if the copy of a financial report you’re holding is current or not. Anyone that wants to keep paper also now has an added burden of following new or tightened policies concerning the secure storage of it.
Side benefit is that it saves us tons of money on document archiving. Care to guess how many acres of forest are stashed away in dusty boxes at places like Iron Mountain across the country with labels reading “Destroy in seven years”? Care to guess what tiny percentage of those boxes are ever seen by their owner again before the storage company rolls through the aisles and pulls the “expired” boxes and tosses them into the shredder?
We still need to keep things like signature cards and contracts, but DMS and the culture surrounding it has really whacked out a lot of intermediate stuff that used to just go off to die a slow seven-year death.
Is fax use down? With the spread of email, my fax use has almost gone away. My paper use has gone up in 2 places.
The first is when I need to compare 2 thinks. Price lists, spec sheets… Because of the size of my monitor, it’s uncomfortable to have up 2 documents. It’s much easier to print out one and compare/transfer the info to the other on my monitor.
The second is when I need a reminder of unfinished business. Print out the page, highlight what’s pending, put it in a pile on the desk until I can complete it. This also lets me jot notes on my progress.
I’m “the printer guy” for a large international law firm. We use a staggering amount of paper and I barely need monitoring tools because if any printer anywhere has any problem at all we get calls from panicky users immediately.
I can dig up the usage reports but our printing volume is constantly increasing, month after month, year after year.
Number of contributing factors:
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Many people prefer to proofread hardcopy, so every time there’s a revision to a document they run off a copy, mark it up and have their secretary type the changes in. That new rev makes the rounds, other people do the same, etc.
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The printers keep getting faster. When I started at the firm about 7 years ago our standard network printer was a LJ4Si. My first big project was replacing all of those with newer LJ8100/8150 (print speed goes up to 34ppm). About two years ago I replaced all of the LJ81xx with LJ4350 - up to 55ppm. People aren’t printing the same amount as they used to in less time, they are instead keeping the printers busy about the same amount of time, only now they are spitting out 50% more pages.
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Some people do still print out their emails to read (or rather, they have their secretary do so). Sounds very Dilbert but it’s true.
IMHO I think that #2 is the biggest driver; if you had to do all of your work and revising and so on by hand, you’d probably put a lot more care into getting it “right” the first time around, if for no other reason than it’s a pain to do by hand. Now it’s very simple to edit and run off more hardcopy, so people do it for relatively trivial reasons - “Barbara, I’d like to see that 400 page pleading in Times New Roman instead of Arial, run off three copies and let’s see how it looks.”
I don’t run our fax center and I know that they are busy but I do get the impression that the increasing use of email is killing a lot of faxes off - when I do offsite trial setups email is critical but having a fax machine is usually an afterthought and it often gets little if any use. Again, convenience plays a big part in this.
Wait, people still have secretaries nowadays? How quaint.
Seems to me that computers DO save paper. In a computerless world, there would not be enough trees on Earth to supply the paper for the amount of information that is exchanged today.
But since the rate of information exchange has gone up astronomically, paper consumption continues to grow, just not nearly as fast as it would have in a world without computers.
Anyway, that’s the impression I get. I don’t have any facts or anything to back that up, I just thought I’d throw it out there.
I think the answer depends on the industry. I work as a tech writer in the computer biz, and my experiences have been quite different. We seem to be using hard copy much less nowadays, mostly because we aren’t delivering documentation in hard copy. When we proofread, we want to be looking at what the user sees.
In our business, anyone who prints out his or her e-mail to read it is considering a hopeless doofus. I have maybe seen two or three people in the last five years who did this.
I don’t have a secretary, and I don’t even know any. When I joined my current company, I was shocked to find that they had administrative assistants, since my previous two companies didn’t have any.
I use my filing cabinet for storing computer equipment, since nobody sends me paper and I don’t print any myself. Since I joined this company three months ago, I’ve only used the printers for printing out maps. Everything else is electronic.
Same goes for home. I recycle or shred and recycle all the plain paper I get in the mail. I think I maybe pay five bills per year with paper; everything else goes through Quicken. I do save receipts and medical bills for my records, although I also have to note that Quicken allows you to scan these.
[sheepish former hippie speaking]
My new gig requires me to compare multiple documents simultaneously and, while the Windows interface (and various Linux interfaces) work okay for that, I found myself saying the following this morning: “F*ck this. I’m printing all 400 pages.” Having done that, though, I have a readily handy reference model in a binder (clients like binders). And it’s not something I’m using only once.
Anecdote aside, paper consumption is almost certainly increasing. But I suspect that since the majority of the increase occurs in an office setting (where I presume recycling usually happens), waste might be level or diminished.
Long story, short answer, no hard data. Lo siento.
Jeez, someone must be doing a study of this. Where’s the data? This is the SDMB, after all. Isn’t there someone who has the SD?
Didn’t corporate offices used to use lots of memos? I’ve never seen a paper memo in the years I’ve been at my corporate job.
In fact, I only get a few pieces of “official” paper a year, and those are items for my personal file like performance reviews, that they consider too sensitive to email.
From here (PDF),
US paper consumption dropped about 7% in the period of 1999 - 2003.
Senior partners… Bless their little hearts that are still somewhere back in 1965 or so.
I used to work at a law firm, and it was really obvious that the young bucks understood technology and could do things like email documents, read on-screen, and type their own stuff, but each and every senior partner dictated their work and had his secretary transcribe and print off everything, firmly stuck in the physical world of having to hold something in their hand.