So, What Is Wrong With Paper ?
There are MANY excellent answers to this important question. Any one of which should be more than sufficient for a rational person with a functional brain (but not for non-learning entities).
Trees play an essential role in our environment. When allowed to grow, trees absorb Global Warming CO2 greenhouse gas and release pure oxygen, which is essential to the survival of all humans and animals. We are killing more-than-100-million trees per year for a growing mountain of unnecessary, easily-avoidable paperwork. Inefficient paperwork is now costing our U.S. companies and governmental agencies a MAJORITY of their administrative operating expenses. It is a century-old Bad Habit that SHOULD have been eliminated in the 1970’s.
One tree must be killed to produce less than 17 five-hundred-sheet packages of office paper (for inefficient photocopiers, fax machines, computer printers, mailings, filing cabinets, etc.) How many such packages of paper does YOUR company use per day, week, month and year? How much serious environmental damage and deforestation is being done by each home, office, state and country per year? Paper making companies do NOT charge the true total environmental impact cost of paper. We wish they would charge over $1 per sheet, which would motivate long-overdue elimination of paper.
The problem with Global Warming is not just the unprecedented monstrous release of greenhouse gases. It is also our massive deforestation that eliminates Earth’s ability to REDUCE CO2, and provide O2 for us all to breathe. The world has ignored this unsustainable deforestation trend for far too long. Very soon, it will have a much-larger worldwide impact than ever before. THE DEADLY TREND OF KILLING TREES MUST BE REVERSED IMMEDIATELY, and by-the-way, it will greatly lower unnecessary administrative costs, streamline and accelerate the entire enterprise.
Wasting 10,000 sheets of office paper requires killing about 1.2 trees PER PERSON per year. This paper-plus-ink/toner has a direct and immediate business expense of roughly $700 per person per year for black, and several thousand dollars for a significant percentage of color images. Color costs nothing extra on a computer display, and paper cannot show animation or interactivity, the way a computer display easily does.
Printer vendors will essentially give you printers almost for free, to get you hooked on buying their expensive ink/toner cartridges. If you had to fill your car gas tank with retail-priced printer ink, each fillup would cost you about $180,000 – They make their profits on the consumable you are wasting uselessly every day - That very-addictive “FREE” printer, ISN’T!
If you look near a local area printer, there is probably a large pile of unproductive cover sheets and pages with only a few lines of useless information. There may even be many sheets printed from the Internet with very-expensive, color advertisements for products that no one needs. Multiply this gross inefficiency times the number of workers in your office, and then times the number of similar offices throughout the world. It adds up to close to a billion dollars worth of useless printed paper in the U.S., PLUS many times more dollars for the time consumed reading, assimilating, and redundantly reprocessing the information on the expensive, unnecessary paper, which may soon be discarded anyway.