Thirty-three years ago this month the phrase “paperless office” entered the business lexicon in a BusinessWeek article titled “The Office of the Future.” In the article, George Pake, the legendary head of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center [PARC], foresaw technology that by 1995 would let computer users summon on-screen documents “by pressing a button,” eliminating the need for much if not all the printed paper cluttering workspaces.
Pake’s vision was half-right. Offices brim with network-linked computers, loaded with software that lets users create, read, duplicate, and distribute digital documents. But the dream of a workplace where all that technology would eliminate the need for printed documents remains just that — a dream.
Indeed, some of the very machinery that makes paper theoretically obsolete has helped make it all the more ubiquitous. Devices that scan and convert documents to a digital format double as printers and copiers — and they’ve become so small, cheap, and easy to use that they’re on — or near — every desktop. “The decision to print has gotten much closer to the owner of the document,” says David Pineault, a paper economist and analyst at consulting firm InfoTrends. According to RISI, a research firm that tracks forest products, in 1975 the average U.S. office worker used 62 pounds of paper a year. By 1999, that figure peaked at 143 pounds, but in 2006 it was still at 127 pounds.
Think Before Printing
Three decades on, the financial and environmental imperative to reduce paper use is all the more real. Last year, U.S. companies printed 1.5 trillion pages, according to research firm IDC. That’s a 95,000-mile-high stack of paper, or the equivalent of 15 million to 20 million trees. RISI analyst John Maine estimates that companies will spend about $8 billion this year on paper alone; that doesn’t include costs…