Seems I recall there were predications in the 1980’s that paper consumption would plummet as more and more documents would be stored electronically. The “paperless office” and all that. So was the prediction true? Are we using less paper now?
There is a book out called, “The Myth of the Paperless Office” . According to this review:
Computer printers generate more paper than ever in the office. Prior to these wond’rous devices, producing a sheet of text would involve manual typing, or maybe being hand-cranked out by a Roneo press, or for big, technical offices you could copy big blueprints with a huge machine that smells of ammonia. All of these methods were hassle, and tended to limit deforestation rates.
I think it’s hilarious that the Google ads are selling 80’s skinny ties on this thread. 
In my personal experience, the places I’ve worked use e-mail to substitute for memos and notes and such, but at the same time what Fridgemagnet says holds true - printing is easy, copying is easy, people do more of both than they would if they had to, say, mimeograph.
No way!
Still at 3 squares per wipe here.
As a postal worker, I can report that (traditional paper) mail volumes were expected to plummet when the internet became widely known in the mid-90s. However, volumes increased significantly every year until about 2002/03, when they trailed off, and are now slowly declining. This decline is very slow, and we are still mailing more snail mail than we were pre-internet.
I’m sorry, I am laughing so hard that I can’t add anything useful to the thread. 
I remember when I was a student and the university gave us a choice of printing on a dot-matrix for free or printing on a laser printer at something like £0.10 per page for B&W and £0.50 per colour page.
My girlfriend is studying now and I am considering bying a 12ppm colour laser for about £200 for her to print her essays on.
Personally, I use more paper in a day now than I did in a week in the 1990s.
Weyerhauser just announced they were closing our local pulp mill.
Why?
People consume less copy paper now. So Weyerhauser thinks we’re using less paper in the office.
**It’s the digital age. Are we using less paper? **
Our payroll system at work went on a new computer system two years ago. Previously daily hour totals (only) for each employee were entered into the computer. Now every hour of every day’s work various tasks are recorded by each employee on one or more paper timesheets, every day, from which they are entered into the computer. Then each sheet must be saved, for 3 or 5 years. One or more 8.5x11-inch sheets for each employee, every work day. We’ve bought three file cabinets to store them since then.
In a previous job, we destroyed some of our paperless data that was stored on 5 1/4-inch floppy discs. Next to go will be the current floppies.
Speaking on a personal level I have cut down on the amount of paper that is mailed to me. All my utility bills, Bank statements, credit-card statements and annual reports from companies where I hold shares ( stocks) are emailed to me. The dividend cheques from these companies are also transferred electronically to my bank account. I pay many of my bills by direct-debit so that also cuts down on my outgoing paper mail.
The rate might have declined. Let me talk about digital workflows and real paperless offices.
Computers have enabled digital workflow and paperless offices, but these technolgies are now just coming into their own.
As the head of an imaging department (taking paper, scanning it and using electronic document workflows) we also PREVENT our company from downloading ANYTHING, or printing any report, fax, e-mail, internet data, etc, by importing them in our electronic doc workflow.
We import items into our electronic document workflow. Instead of faxes and such being printed, they go into out electronic worlflow for display on a screen.
Electronic documents/imaging/etc is just starting to come into its own. Computers were not going to make us paperless, but in retrospect, the less-paper (not paperless hyperbole) office can now be enabled.
I work with idiots who print out their emails. These same idiots will be emailed a link, follow the link to that page, and then print out that page to show it to me. It drives me goddam nuts. So I don’t know if we’re using less paper now, but I do know we COULD be using a whole lot less.
This is an interesting topic. As people have pointed out, one thing computers are really, really good at is generating more paper. In my work life, it’s not unusual, when we’re giving a presentation, to e-mail it to participants beforehand (some of whom print it out), project it on a screen during the meeting, AND print copies for everyone in the room (plus extras, just in case).
In the end, I find it comes down to habit. And you can actually break yourself of the habit of printing everything out. It’s not often that printing affords an advantage over having the document on your screen. Occasionally, but not often.
And I’ll second what Mr. Blue Sky said – hospitals are so far behind the curve that it’s not even the least bit funny. It’s a paper world there, all right, with all the vast inefficiencies that go along with that.
Or as I heard a number of years ago, “The paperless office makes about as much sense as the paperless bathroom.”
Most definitely, I have used less paper. emails don’t really save that much, but its sigificant nonetheless. Online pdf files save a hell of a lot of paper. I may generate a page or two of actual paper every month or two.
I think the the myth that the computer age is generating more paper is just that, a myth, with no basis in reality, at all.
Amen.
And add to that everything else printed, and pinned up in the cubicle.
The damn thing goes on all night, and I only use it about 6 times a year. And that’s just to print test pages for the people trying to figure out their broke printer!
Personally, I try to print documents as seldom as I can get away with it. I use e-mail at work as much as possible, and I installed CutePDF on my computer so that if there are online documents I need to keep, I can “print” them to a PDF file stored on my computer, rather than having a hard copy.
I teach computer appication courses, and I require students to submit the electronic files, rather than printouts of the documents they create for the course. The course syllabus, assignment instructions, etc. are all posted on a university-provided website, so I don’t have to hand out paper copies of that material. (Some of my students admittedly hate this, but since it is a computer class, I intend to make full use of the tools available to me, and if they need hard copies, they can print them out on their own–our university doesn’t even charge print-specific fees.)
I have switched to electronic billing and payment for those bills that will allow me to do it easily. I stopped reading newspapers and news magazines in print format, and signed up for e-mail delivery of most of that information.
I am still overwhelmed with paper generated by others that I don’t want, and would prefer to receive by other means. My son (fifth grade) brings home reams of paper in the form of school work, announcements, advertisements, etc. I get insurance statements, bank statements, etc. by mail. My husband insists on reading the local paper (in paper format) every morning, so we have a stack of once-read papers that needs to be taken to the recycling center. The Powers-That-Be at my university insist on distibuting information in paper format, because of the handful of faculty members who refuse to check e-mail daily.
Teachers at my daughter’s high school have started to figure out how to distribute information electronically, and the school has an extensive web site available to them. But the transition is slow. One teacher in particular has all assignments and calendars on his website, and never hands out paper at all. At the opposite end is the teacher who will distribute only one hard copy of any document to any student because their print allowance is too low to allow extra copies, but they don’t seem to understand that they could e-mail or post electronic copies of that material for free. (And none of the documents I am referring to appear to come from workbooks or typewriters, so they must be word processing documents stored on their computer.)
Remember typewriters?
Remember engineering computations done with slide rules and hand-written in columns?
Back then, paper was valuable–'cause each page took an hour to produce.
If you made a change to one word or number, you penciled it in on the original piece of paper. Today , of course, you re-print the entire page, and often, the entire document.
Say-print out a 15 page document to show your boss. He makes 3 minor changes, and you reprint all 15 pages
My office uses lots more paper now than back-in-the-good-ol’-days.