KEY POINTS:
The latest threat to the planet is not plastic bags or tin cans - it's the annual waste mountain of a trillion sheets of paper churned out by office printers only to be binned within hours, a study has found.
Predictions of the paperless office - first made by Business Week magazine in a 1975 article on the Office of the Future - have proved greatly exaggerated. Although an estimated nine trillion pages a year are confined to computer screens, the number of printed pages stands at between 2.5 and 2.8 trillion worldwide and is predicted to grow over the next 10 years.
Behavioural research for the printer manufacturer Xerox found office workers throw away 45 per cent of everything they print within a day, equivalent to more than a trillion pages every year. The most popular "one-time use" examples are daily assignments, drafts and emails. Others include cover sheets, e-tickets for flights and directions printed in lieu of maps.
Paul Smith, a laboratory manager at Xerox's research centre in Toronto, Canada, said: "Some people use what they've printed only for a minute. A cover page on a network printer job only survives maybe 30 seconds: you just recognise your job and then you recycle it.
"You might only take an email to a meeting and then recycle it. Even if you want to use it a few days later, the study showed that people still recycle it because they don't want to have to go and look for that same printout. You've already stored it electronically and you know where you've put it, so you just print it again."
A separate study, to be published this week, discloses that British offices print up to 120 billion pieces of paper every year. This survey, for Fujitsu Siemens Computers, found the average British office worker printed 22 pages every working day. A lot of things get printed out mistakenly or are quickly thrown away.
-Observer
