Half a century ago, even before anyone ever thought of the World Wide Web or most of the gadgets we now use to access it, visions of a paperless society began to appear. Soon, futurists promised, technology would make paper record keeping, even paper reading obsolete.
Now, we communicate by email. We can ask all the companies that send us regular statements to send them electronically. If we find something online that we want to keep, we can preserve it as a PDF. Think of all the trees we’re saving!
But a paperless society? It hasn’t happened yet, and it probably never will. We can do better than we are, though.
InfoTrends, a company that specializes in research about electronic document management, estimated that local, state, and federal governments used 122 billion sheets of paper. Each individual’s share of that amounts to 400 sheets.
On average, American paper consumption amounts to more than 748 pounds per person, much of it completely unnecessary. My source provides that figure within the context of “volume from digital hard-copy devices.” Does it even include periodicals, packaging, paper towels and napkins, and toilet paper?
The following infographic illustrates the amount of paper Americans use and what resources the manufacture of it consumes. More important, it illustrates strategies businesses and governments are doing to reduce the amount they use.
Individual households can use some of the same paper-reduction tactics and save a lot of money in the process. And that money represents not only the cost of paper, but the tax dollars required to haul it away.
We’ll probably never see a paperless society, but with determination, we can see a society that wastes less paper.
How to Offset Your Printing Footprint – An infographic by the team at StinkyInk.com
Source:
A paperless society? Not so fast / Nicholas A. Basbanes (Los Angeles Times, December 8, 2013)
Infographic from Stinky Ink.
Photo credit: Some rights reserved by Images of Money.
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