This is apropos of nothing aside from running across something that made me wonder if demand for paper was up or down. I expected to see that it was still going up, which would prompt a snarky remark about the paperless office and related things. But no:
Global demand for ordinary office paper (i.e., not packaging or paper towels or pulp) peaked around 2007 and has been trending steadily down ever since. In rich countries demand peaked in 2000 and has declined by half since then. Maybe there's more to this whole paperless office thing than I thought.
What would Max Palevsky say?
Good heavens, the reduction just in the higher education sector has been enormous. Instead of business students, for example, submitting two or three assignments per subject per semester ranging from two to 20 pages each, they now submit everything online. That's about a ream of bleached A4 paper for every two students a year - not counting the drafts that got thrown away before submission.
Now they submit everything online. They also get all their learning resources online, after bitter resistance from Boomer academics who stubbornly insisted for years on sending out hard copies of the course readings which were on the website, most of which were never opened. Textbooks too are increasingly web-based resources without any hard copy content.
For my honors thesis references, I had two 12-bottle wine cartons full of photocopied academic journal articles. For my doctorate, I had the internet.
Judging from the pictures of boxes of government documents kept in Trump’s bathroom I suspect the decrease isn’t coming from government.
Who needs paper when we've got all these Amazon boxes laying around to jot junk down on?
Most large cities have replaced paper building permit drawing sets with online digital uploads. It was not uncommon 20 years ago that you'd have to submit 4 or more copies of plans for each phase of permitting. In one jurisdiction, you had to submit 7. You can imagine how onerous that would be if you had even just 25 sheets.
I'm surprised it's not a bigger drop. When I started my job (reviewing and editing commercial contracts) ten years ago, I printed so much. Even if I did all editing on my computer, I had to print two copies of every contract and get them hand-signed, and then store them in cabinets. That's all gone now.
And “paper” overall?
In my experience, younger office workers don't use paper at all. It's only the older people who established their information-handling habits before 2000 who still insist on using paper for anything.
Personally, I actively dislike paper documents. They are cumbersome, clutter my space, and are not as easy to find when you need them as digital files, nor can they be digitally edited or sent to others via email. I'd be rooting for their extinction even if they weren't bad for the environment.
I can confirm that DOD unclassified stuff is nearly all digital, only legacy paper files exist and those are rapidly reading the NARA mandated time frame for destruction.
Apropos of nothing, I managed to cut my office paper use by at least 90% by simply not restoring the wifi connection with the printer. If the Principal HP (the other employee) wants something printed, he has to physically go to the printer and attach the USB cord to his laptop.
Previously, he'd hit "PRINT" all the time and never bother to pick up or even look at his output...
Lots of offices seem to have a paper-wasting idiot of that type. It's beyond ridiculous to have a pile of unused printouts cluttering the printer. I like your solution!
I can remember the last time I printed something, because I discovered my home printer stopped working and had to go to the office. It was over a year ago.
And that was more because I had to do this annoying 4-way reconciliation between lists of things and couldn't come up with a reasonable digital workflow without writing code, and the job just wasn't big enough for that, it was just easier to check things off while taking notes.
Although if you count other digital output, I still "print". It is just CnC endmill on metal instead of a print head on paper.
My office recently got rid of 60% of our printers (all the B&W-only ones). And this is at a publishing company that still produces a paper magazine and physical books.
Some of that is due to lack of demand because many people are still working remotely, but a lot of us is that we just don't see the need to print out everything anymore. The managers that, e.g., wanted everyone to have a hard copy of every meeting agenda have finally retired.
Some of us are old enough to remember when computers and printers first became ubiquitous in the office, but before the internet was really a thing. Suddenly everything had to be printed out. Proposed new policy draft? Print out all 20 pages and put a copy in everyone's (physical) mailbox. Same for meeting notes. The whole ethos was captured in a Dilbert cartoon where the pointy haired boss told Dilbert: "I need to learn about the internet. Print out a copy for me and I'll review it over the weekend".
Some of us are old enough to remember the Ditto machine and the smell of freshly copied papers.
Illegible freshly copied papers, if I recall mimeographs correctly.
I personally haven't printed anything at or for work for three years. Haven't bought a ream of paper for my home printer in five years. I'm actually surprised it isn't lower.
I teach physics. My class is to the point that each semester I use exactly one piece of paper. It is on the first day and is for them to tell me which group they are in so I can set up the LMS.