What Paper Costs (The Bigger Picture)

I often say that moving to electronic documents can save a business serious money. I'm speaking from my own experience and from observing other businesses that are doing this. Simply put; It makes your company more efficient and reduces costs for labor, consumables and storage. A dollar saved is a dollar earned and in a tight economy that's a very important dollar.

I felt good about this, but recently a number of eminent sources have pointed out to me that there is a bigger picture to be considered; what does it do for the environment if we reduce paper usage? My first thought was, It improves things!, however this felt a bit weak so I had a go at quantifying how much paper we actually use and what it takes to produce it.

I concentrated on paper for printing and writing. This is the stuff we use most in the office. I didn't include newsprint because there's not much that a regular business can do to reduce this. Also this is a bit conservative because I only consider the cost of production and not what we do with it, transport, mailing costs etc. I also didn't consider the negative CO2 impact of the removal of so many trees. (Paper production accounts for 40% of all the trees felled in the world).
There are a number of good information sources available on the web including several from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Here's a little 8-slide presentation on the impact of office-paper production in the U.S. (Note: Even though the numbers are HUGE, this is still only 27% of total U.S. paper production.)

What Paper Costs (PDF)

I must confess I learned a lot working through these figures. One thing is that the annual energy used to produce paper is routinely measured in quads.
A quad is a thousand trillion BTUs of energy (or 10x¹⁵ BTUs for the scientifically inclined). When you are working with numbers that have 15 zeros after them you know it adds up to a really big impact.
On a more human scale; The average US office worker consumes 10,000 sheets of paper a year while an attorney consumes a ton!

Here are some good resource links (Some of them are a bit technical - sorry).

U.S. Department of Energy: Energy and Environmental Profile of the U.S. Pulp and Paper Industry (PDF)
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: Trends in Selected Manufacturing Sectors (PDF)
National Energy Education Development (NEED) Project. US Energy Consumption.
IPST technical paper series number 601 Pulp and paper mill water use in North America (PDF)
U. C. Irvine, Physics and Astronomy (Dennis Silverman) Energy Units and Conversions

This one (sponsored by the U.S. D.O.E) is a really good non-technical reference on paper use.
Cutting Paper