People in the U.S. use an average of 11,916 sheets of paper per year.
People in the E.U. consume about 7,280 sheets per year.
Worldwide paper production provides 1,510 sheets per year per person.
The "paperless office" has turned out to be a bit of a pipe dream.
From the study -
"Interestingly, the information flow figures for U.S. consumption represent over 35% of the total original worldwide print information flow. While the U.S. is indeed the global leader in production and storage of information, these flow figures are largely influenced by the office document use in the U.S.. If the office documents component were removed from the equation, the U.S. accounts for slightly over 10% of the world's original information flow in print. This underlines the high use of paper in U.S. offices as compared to that in nations around the world.
There have been some changes in the creation of new information between our previous study and the current one, but most of the changes have been fairly small except in the area of office documents. Contrary to notions of paperless offices floated in the late 80s and early 90s, the consumption of office paper has gone up substantially in the recent years, especially following the move to laser/inkjet printers from dot matrix printers. Paper use in offices has further risen with the increasing speed of laser printing coupled with its decreasing cost. Each year, almost 500 billion copies are produced on copiers in the United States; nearly 15 trillion copies are produced on copiers, printers, and multi-function machines. (Source: XeroxParc)."
There's a lot of fascinating information in the study besides paper use. Just one example -
"Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks.
* How big is five exabytes? If digitized with full formatting, the seventeen million books in the Library of Congress contain about 136 terabytes of information; five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress book collections."
Better get to readin...
There may be some hope in the office paper reduction quest according to this DenverPost.com article, paper purchasing was growing at 6 to 7% per year as we started using those fancy laser and injet printers but has slowed to 4% per year now.
