The truth about paper

As inventions go it has to be said that paper was one of the better ones. Whoever you decide to credit, whether the ancient Egyptians (Papyrus) or the Chinese chap T’sai Lun, who fabricated a sheaf more representative of what we have today, they could never have known how enduring it’s become never mind how prolific.

According to Wikipedia paper consumption has increased by 400% in the last 40 years and at the same time the world has gone into technological overdrive. So despite all of these technological advancements, including the dawn of new media and the digital age it seems that we’re still totally addicted to paper.

So what is it that we love so much about paper? Is it the way it feels? Is it the way it reads? Or maybe it’s just the best way to present information. Maybe we prefer something tangible or perhaps despite our technological advancements we haven’t been able to come up with anything better.

Sure we have electric paper and yes the Kindle, the iPad and other eReaders have resulted in less books being sold, although the book is doing much better than the CD in the digital age! The US book market only declined by only 2.5% in 2011 even though eBook sales grew by 31%. Bizarrely in the UK paper books incur no VAT whereas eBooks attract the highest rate of tax at 20%, this is hard to imagine given that paper is so environmentally damaging to manufacture and also incurs considerable logistics to transport.

There’s no doubt that we send a heck of a lot of e-mails but certainly any talk prophesising the demise of our mail services is greatly exaggerated. Whilst letter volumes have decreased by 6% since 2011 the Royal Mail still deliver more than 58M letters every day! Some believe that snail mail will outlive email particularly given that many of the next generation use social media to communicate; perhaps many of them will never even have the need for an email address. Just like texting is replacing the phone call, (imagines a world where we don’t talk to each other anymore) it appears that tweeting and instant messaging is replacing e-mail.

And that’s the conundrum for businesses; paper will remain an essential medium of communication containing hugely important content. Paper is expensive to retain, maintain, action or refer back to. Those businesses that implement capture solutions extracting valuable information and expediting important business processes can now react quicker than their competitors but they can also secure valuable prizes with reduced or redeployed headcount and efficiencies that can include; for example, early payment discounts. Once confidence is gained many business also remove the costs of paper storage by secure disposal, hey most new offices don’t have room for rows of filing cabinets.

Back to the longevity of paper, amazingly the University of Cambridge has even developed a laser which can remove toner that has already been fused on the page, a sort of “do it yourself” attempt at recycling which although missing the point by the proverbial “country mile” is still an ingenious achievement, but once again begs the question why can’t we just print less?

My belief is that toner and ink are the real “black gold” and that the influence of their purveyors,  inspired by the invention of Gutenborg  and growing fat on huge profits will lobby hard for the virtues of print and paper consumption will ultimately prevail. I’d hazard a guess that printer ink is more expensive than oil!! Did you ever wonder why when printing your boarding card that it is followed like some kind of unstoppable paper flood with page after page of useless information or that when you print web content that the “print preview function” is totally disregarded and the result is a smorgasbord of content over far too many pages.

The futurists may yearn for new media to finally deliver the “holy grail” that is the “paperless office” but given that technology appears not to be reducing paper consumption greatly perhaps the “less paper office” is now the real prize.  

Environmentalists quite rightly bang the drum of de-forestation and pull on our heart strings with pictures of cuddly animals going extinct, articles that get picked up and covered in everything from the red tops to the broadsheets like some kind of ironic parody.  The truth is that the production of paper requires not only shaving the face of the earth of indispensable trees but also requires vast quantities of fresh drinking water in locations where the need is obviously greater for the indigenous people.

And of course paper production is an intensive process driven by the polluting filth of heavy machinery spoiling some of the most beautiful and previously untouched parts of the world, displacing previously undiscovered peoples like some modern day industrial revolution.

The realists see a world where paper will always have a place, changing habits that have been learned over thousands of years is no small task. New generations will learn about the increased productivity from truncating the paper process (by scanning and capturing an electronic image) and as our dwellings reduce in size people will begrudge the storage room required to house our life on paper.  Let’s be pragmatic and realise that the “paperless office” is a mirage, we cannot totally replace the best form of media ever invented but we can control how prolific it could become.

And the shareholders of large printer companies surely have nothing to fear in the short term, it’s just a shame that the relatives of Mr. Lun or for that matter those of Gutenborg were not afforded a small royalty based on the discoveries of their ancestors as they surely would be competing to be some of the wealthiest people that ever lived.