The promise of the paperless office has been with us since the dawn of the computer age. But rather than reduce the amount of paper we use, it has consistently increased our consumption of that eminently replaceable product. In fact, the more committed a business may be to technology, the more its paper use has been likely to increase.
The challenge has been that letting go of one technology - and paper was a new technology once upon a time - does not always immediately follow the introduction of a new one. Global postal services may have seen volume shrink, but office use of paper as a back-up or reminder has continued to grow. Until recently.
There is now some evidence that the mobile phone is doing what the desk top and laptop computer could not: putting an end to paper use. Or at least causing a reduction in the rate of growth.
Not everyone will rejoice. There is safety and comfort in those receipts and stray bits of paper on which reminders, codes, phone numbers and addresses are written. But a generation weaned on the mobile phone finds that an amusing anachronism. Take notes? Please. Just take a picture of whatever was written on the whiteboard. Or ask for a copy of whatever appeared on someone else's phone. There will, of course, be challenges, like authenticating and validating. But faith in technology will out.
In the meantime, save a couple of reams of 8.5 x 11 bright white. You may be able to sell them on eBay some day. JL
Timothy Taylor comments in the Conversable Economist:
As computers became widespread in the 1980s and into the early 1990s, a common prediction was that we were headed for the "paperless office." But that prediction went badly astray, as Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper pointed out in their 2002 book, The Myth of the Paperless Office.
For example, they cited evidence that consumption of common office paper rose by 14.7% from 1995 and 2000 and they argued that that when organizations started using e-mail, their consumption of paper rose by 40%. In short, it appeared that information technology was not a substitute for the use of paper, but instead was a complement for it--in other words, computerization was going to be the best thing that ever happened to the paper industry.
But although the transition took some time, it now appears that at least U.S. offices are becoming, if not quite paperless, much less paper-intensive. Here's a figure from the Environmental Paper Network's State of the Paper Industry 2011, which came out last year. Notice in particular the decline in paper use since about 2007 in North America and Western Europe.
The report describes U.S. paper consumption trends in this way (notes omitted):
"Consumption of paper and paperboard products has experienced significant decline in North America since 2007. This is attributable primarily to the aftermath of the financial crisis in the United States at the end of the decade. The poor economy motivated many companies to perform a close analysis of their paper use and inspired the adoption of innovative and more efficient systems. These new systems will remain in place into the economic recovery and likely have a lasting impact on printing and writing paper consumption. In addition, the shift in the patterns of consumption of news and other media from print to digital formats is also apparently having an irreversible effect in some paper sectors such as newsprint.
"Total global consumption of paper is still rising, reaching 371 million tonnes in 2009. However, total paper consumption in North America has declined 24% between 2006 and 2009. Per capita consumption of paper in North America dropped from more than 652 lbs/year in 2005 to 504 lbs/year in 2009.
"North Americans still, however, consume almost 30 times more paper per capita than the average person in Africa and 6 times more than the average person in Asia. In 2009, total paper consumption in China eclipsed total North American consumption for the first time."
I remember stories from the old days of computerized offices, maybe 15-20 years ago, about executives who wanted all their e-mails and reports printed out. Those days are gone. But it's interesting to me that even for a change that seems as obvious as electronic communication leading to less paper, it took some years and the pressures of a recession for substantial change to take effect. Similarly, it wasn't until about 2006 that the volume of mail carried by the U.S. Postal Service took a nosedive. All the consequences of major technological changes can take decades to ripple through an economy
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